Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route (Alice James Books, 2022) and two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013) and Contradictions in the Design (Alice James Books, 2016). He is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Matthew Olzmann Introduces Tobi Kassim
A “nature poem,” in the hands of Tobi Kassim, can arrive in a number of forms, be about a range of topics, and use a wide variety of approaches. Nature […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Elephant
I have 40,000 muscles in my trunk and 396 in the rest of my body. I can remember a boneyard from three lamentations ago. I smell rain six countries away. […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Epithalamium That Turns from the Garden
The problem with flowers in poetry is the petals are always ethereal and wispy, early buds of new attraction. Most have never endured the first frost of the Upper Midwest […]
Nature's Nature
May/June 2016
Return to Sender
To the topsoil and subsoil: returned. To humus and blistered rock: returned. To the kingdom of the masked chafer beetle, the nematode and the root maggot: returned. To the darkness […]
Nature's Nature
May/June 2016
Letter to a Cockroach, Now Dead and Mixed into a Bar of Chocolate
Regulations allow for, on average, sixty insect fragments per hundred grams of chocolate in America. You are pulverized. The thorax, the head, the legs that no longer twitch. Invisible and […]
Nature's Nature
May/June 2016
Plasticity
It’s easier, now, for a man stranded on an island to place a message in a bottle and have it carried away on the backs of the waves. Before, it […]
Poetry
Winter 2011
In the Gallery of American Violence
the musket sulks in the corner. Not only is it exhausted, it feels utterly humiliated. A pack of wild school kids huddles around the display case, bored, terribly skeptical that […]
Poetry
Winter 2011
Was Blind, but Now
For the first time, a man wears his glasses and is startled by the crispness of things, the lines etched on every surface, the colors racing toward him. How the […]
Matthew Olzmann
Matthew Olzmann is the author of two poetry collections: Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013) and Contradictions in the Design (forthcoming from Alice James in November.) He is the 2015–16 Kenan […]