Books and Chapbooks
Books and chapbooks can be ordered from select online booksellers or directly from the author, via the links below. (Free shipping on all orders via the "Add to Cart" links. Specify if you'd like books autographed/personalized in the PayPal form.)
Every Possible Blue (CW Books, 2012)
"Saturated with color and light, Thorburn’s second collection celebrates New York with deft, vivacious strokes. Similar to the way a city is always rebuilt, or a painter reworks a canvas, Thorburn’s poems pay special attention to the clothing and adornments that change to fit life’s varied occasions."
--Publishers Weekly
"A love song to New York City and to painting, Every Possible Blue doesn't choose between life and art because Matthew Thorburn's wise enough to know that the art of life is a life in art. In his exuberant new collection, Thorburn never lets you forget that words are his medium, as he stops to reflect on the hurt in 'wound up,' when thinking about the fate of a gift after a divorce, and as later on he can be grateful for the pain that is 'only bread.' Here's what a poetry of happiness can sound like, in poems as 'touched / by light' as Bonnard's paintings, about which he writes. Every Possible Blue is a joy to read."
—Sharon Dolin
"Whether clean shaven and erudite or broken and besotted, Matthew Thorburn's poems are always luminous, lush and spirited. Their depth brings to mind Jarrell, their playfulness, Stevens. What a rich spectrum of experience, craft and sheer linguistic fun Every Possible Blue provides!"
—Kathy Fagan
Available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or via the link below.
35 poems, 75 pages
$
18.00
Disappears in the Rain (Parlor City Press, 2009)
Disappears in the Rain "touched me in its simplicity, its perfect naturalness, its lack of artifice, its unity of vision, in short, in its being absolutely genuine."
—Stanley H. Barkan, Founder, Cross-Cultural Communications
Disappears in the Rain "is one long poem, kind of a meditation on meditations, with this subtle narrative chord that hums through it with this voice that balances between an American idiom and eastern quietness. It’s an intricate collage of the natural and modern…. [T]his book just continually brings beautiful sustenance to its lucky readers."
--Clay Matthews
Selected by Stanley H. Barkan for the Stephen Dunn Prize
1 poem, 29 pages
$
10.00
Subject to Change (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2004)
"Wallace Stevens once said that poets must love words with all their power to love anything at all. Few first books show as much pleasure in words as Matthew Thorburn's Subject to Change."
—Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review
“The examination of personal nostalgia resonates throughout Matthew Thorburn’s Subject to Change, and this underlying thread of sadness and remorse and hopeful expectation — a quest for what might have been and might yet be — makes the emotional edge of these poems burn with brilliant clarity.”
—Matthew W. Schmeer, Verse
“Although Subject to Change is Matthew Thorburn’s debut collection of poetry, the voice behind these poems is an authoritative voice of, say, a poet mid-career.”
—Richard Scheiwe, Octopus
“Matthew Thorburn’s Subject to Change gives us a poetry of the meta-empirical, asking, ‘It’s not too late, is it?’ Exuberant and crystalline, these poems articulate the problematic beauty of our grand mix-up, our new and comic Dark Ages. The next time a student asks me, ‘What’s after Postmodernism?’ I’ll tell her, ‘Read this.’”
—Angela Ball
Available from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, Barnes & Noble or via the link below.
Selected by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize
32 poems, 73 pages
$
14.00
