Matt Poindexter

Praise for Fatherland

“Matt Poindexter’s Fatherland is luminous. Formally skillful and conceptually poignant, these poems invite readers into the tenderness of fatherhood, deftly navigating threads of familial care, grief, presence, wonderment. In these poems, Poindexter’s poetic attention reshapes time: a father recounts braiding his daughters’ hair, ‘stretch / together to the future / and back to ancestral scalp / of the past.’ Indeed, these poems–vibrant, even insistent, in nuancing wonder–radiate with love for those who have come and gone before us, those who arrive now, and those who will come after. ‘The fatherland,’ writes Poindexter, ‘transforms a man.’ As a reader, I am left transformed, moved, by these exquisite poems.”
—CARLINA DUAN, author of Alien Miss

“‘Give me an eternity of this,’ Matt Poindexter writes, and he captures something of the eternal here, something timeless and tender in these poems that illuminate the mysteries of fatherhood. Full of grief and joy and, always, rippling with love, Fatherland is full of poems that are as emotionally striking as they are sharply made.”
—MATTHEW OLZMANN, author of Constellation Route

“From the opening heartbreaking ‘Magnificat’ to the concluding unflinching ‘Sharper Knives,’ Matt Poindexter roots these well-honed poems in local terrain—not just his native North Carolina, which he knows so well, but also the fraught landscape of family. ‘All of it / washes away sooner than we think,’ he writes, not turning away from loss, but always seeking light in the darkness, discovering beauty in even the most challenging situations. Fatherland is a frank, tender, grateful, technically dazzling, and fully realized collection, a chapbook with more heft and depth and range than many longer volumes. It’s a superb debut by an outstanding poet.”
—MICHAEL McFEE, author of A Long Time to Be Gone

Selected Publications

• The 2River View | read
• The Awl
• Baltimore Review
• Best New Poets 2009 (UVA Press)
• The Coachella Review | read
• Chicago Quarterly Review
• Cumberland River Review | read
• The Greensboro Review
• Harpur Palate Literary Journal | read
• Meridian
• The Missouri Review | read
• the minnesota review
• The Normal School | read
• Quarterly West | read
• The Rupture | read
• storySouth | read
• Southern Poetry Review
• The Swannanoa Review | read
• Tar River Poetry | read