Read Matt Love's Substack newsletter on the crisis of homelessness in Oregon.
A Substantial but Incomplete Autobiography in Poems
By Matt Love
In perhaps the largest, most eclectic volume of previously unpublished poetry in the history of Pacific Northwest literature, Matt Love presents 148 poems written over a 30-year span.
As he writes in the introduction to A Substantial but Incomplete Autobiography in Poems, “I have organized this collection into six categories: Ocean, Love, My Life, Oregon Tavern Age, Homelessness, Probation. These poems serve as a substantial but incomplete autobiography.”
“Confessionals, odes, scatological doggerel, polemics, tankas, haiku, prose, psalms, requiems, observations, love letters, lamentations, lyrics, stream of consciousness, meditations, lists, riffs, a eulogy, a sermon, a commencement speech, found poetry, tributes, elegies. I threw it all into an ancient cement mixer and hand cranked that concrete beast while watching blue herons undulate overhead and drinking red wine as the husky snoozed in his dirt fort. The result: A Substantial but Incomplete Autobiography in Poems, something merging where Charles Bukowski, Richard Hugo, Mary Oliver and Liz Phair blend together.”
None of Love's poems were ever submitted to poetry journals, contests or magazines, making this collection a true renegade project of passion and readable to any denizen of a coastal dive bar.
Teacher of the Year: A Novella
By Matt Love
A reluctant teacher becomes advisor to a moribund high school newspaper. He meets the new editor, a dynamic 18-year-old senior, and together they begin a unique creative collaboration that revives the publication and slowly slides into gray areas. As the poet Octavio Paz wrote, “To realize itself, love must violate the rules of our world…committed by two stars that break out of the conception of love, which implies breaking away and a catastrophe..."
Teacher of the Year unfolds in an energetic mixture of epistle, stream-of-consciousness, narrative and meditations on the craft and alchemy of teaching. There is no other more authentic literary exploration into the agonies and ecstasies of teaching in the annals of American literature than this novella.
