The Sky Contains the Plans

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Description

Matthew Rohrer's latest collection explores the space between wakefulness and sleep, that drowsy loosening of consciousness called hypnagogia. Comprised not of dream-poems but poems that strain to hear dreams' faintest messages squeaked through into waking life, The Sky Contains the Plans lays bare an imagination in which the mundane and surreal contort each other into a new kind of primordial reality.

Reviews

Even through the clamor of war, garbage trucks, stolen cars, and crying babies, Rohrer maintains an alluring tranquility, a Taoist chill to temper a casualness that might otherwise get flagged as too hip. Li Po and Rumi drink jugs of wine, "Wu Wei presides calmly over the lovely closing poem that takes his name, and clouds drift from one poem to the next.
--Michael Brodeur, The Boston Globe

Rohrer's frequently beautiful, brief poems are rooted in specific images that initially seem unrelated--but which ultimately form a unity as meditations on how the ordinary distractions of everyday life can be seen as the source for almost everything important in life.
--Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

Rohrer writes poems that crackle and sputter, often branching toward new meaning and emotion within the span of a single line.
--Publishers Weekly

Over the past year, I found Elisa Gabbert, Sarah Manguso and Matthew Rohrer to have made some life-changing books of poetry--especially Rohrer's book The Others, which goes from one vision to the next in a breathtaking way.
--Andrew Sean Greer, PBS NewsHour

Author Bio

Matthew Rohrer is the author of The Others (Wave Books, 2017, winner of the Believer Book Award), Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002) and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU.