Reviews of & Responses to My Work
Reviews of Destruction Myth (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2010)
Justin Taylor at HTMLGiant
Dennis Etzel Jr at Gently Read
Charles Jensen at The Collagist
Eileen Tabios at Galatea Resurrects
Marc Schuster at Small Press Reviews
Reviews of Play (Cupboard Pamphlets, 2009)
Matthew Simmons at The Chapbook Review
Andrew Borgstrom at The Chapbook Review
Emerging Writers Network
Steven Karl on his blog
Noah Eli Gordon wrote this in Rain Taxi
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Imagine Italo Calvino, Max Jacob, and Henri Michaux collaborating on a small books of instructions for each of the sometimes innocuous, sometimes ominous scenes depicted in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's famous painting Children's Games. The result would be a linguistically concise collision of absurdist parable ans social commentary, wonderfully frightening and strangely cathartic. Lucky for us, mathias Svalina's Play (The Cupboard, $5) is just such a book. Modeled after the numerous mid-century instruction manuals often found on the bookshelves at any Salvation Army store, Svalina's chapbook includes instructions for nearly thirty theoretical children's games. A small sample of their titles gives a sence of the darker side of camaraderie the book explores: "Freight Train Tag"; "Voting Day"; "Bury the Shards of the Broken Light Bulb Where No One Will Ever Find Them"; "Jiggle the Handle." Each piece here starts imply enough, assigning roles to the various players (e.g. "One child is the Stomach. The other children are the Aches"), before delineating the rules, which soon become wild, impossible scenarios: "The children fall asleep repeating their new names to themselves. They discover new names inside their names. The new names are the names their ghosts will have. They knot little nooses of dental floss around the names & tie them to their pinkies." Although the instructions occasionally include an explanation for determining the end of the game, more often they veer into the territory of the prose poem par excellence, as in "Crossing the Brook," which ends thusly: "Those that fall into the brooks must run home to change their stockings. But they are so far from home & the driver of the white bus will not speak to them. There is a light in the forest. is that a distant fire or the buttery windows of a warm farmhouse? It is difficult to tell from here, where the sleet has just begun to fall."
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Reviews of The Viral Lease (Small Anchor Press, 2008)
Loads of Learned Lumber Blog
Uvert Blog
Reviews of Creation Myths (New Michigan Press, 2007)
Josh Walleart at Rattle
Randy Marshall at Blackbird
Responses to My Work
Farrah Field on her blog
Elisabeth Reinkordt's video of my poem "Creation Myth" on the Ninth Letter website
Nathan Young's video of a section my book-length poem Above the Fold on HTMLGiant
posted by Mathias Svalina @ 2:59 PM
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