Matt Donovan is the author of the collection of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016) as well as two collections of poetry – Vellum (Mariner, 2007) and Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press, 2017). He is the recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature, a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Creative Capital Grant, an NEA Fellowship, and the Larry Levis Reading Prize. He’s currently writing a book about American gun culture, and collaborating on the chamber opera Inheritance about the life of Sarah Winchester.
Nonfiction
Mar/Apr 2015
Garden of the Fugitives
At night, in the fish-light of the moon, the dead wear our white shirts To stay warm, and litter the fields. We pick them up in the mornings, dewy pieces […]
Nonfiction
Summer 2011
Dew Point
Acres of morning-drenched hydrangea; a snow leopard spooning the snowy lamb beneath a willow’s blotchy shade; adder-mouth orchids the bullfinch hoards never peck—no matter what precisely they’re leaving behind, what […]
Poetry
Spring 2010
Poem in Which Billie Holiday Is Barely Heard
Her voice a velvet backdrop to mood-thirsty sex or scrubbing bathroom tiles. A giddy All of Me gives way to Strange Fruit, which turns to gauze we mostly ignore over […]
Poetry
Winter 2007
Audubon Diptych
I. Wherein the Swallows Instruct Us on Pleasure Because they daubed with poppy sap the stricken eyes of their young & because each thin body, it was believed, contained a […]