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| Modern Life: Poems | 
 enlarge | Author: Matthea Harvey
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $7.96
You Save: $6.04 (43%)
New (34) Used (10) from $7.85
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 22762
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 80
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.4
ISBN: 1555974805
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9781555974800
ASIN: 1555974805
Publication Date: October 2, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, “The Future of Terror” and “The Terror of the Future,” Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world. Her prose pieces and lyrics examine the divided, halved self in poems about centaurs, ship figureheads, and a robot boy. Throughout, Harvey’s signature wit and concision show us the double-sided nature of reality, of what we see and what we know.
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| Customer Reviews:
 So This is How You Live in the Present January 15, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Matthea Harvey has always empathized with the objective world, introducing emotions to the world of objects. We were taught by her first book to pity the bathtub's forced embrace of the human form, in her second book she blurred humanity and machinery into a sad little breathing machine. In Modern Life she expands on her thesis, showing us the strange world made stranger still by the world itself, a sort of "taxidermist's version of the world" as she says in one poem, nature in an unnatural way. There's a playful aspect to the poems, one side is that she is making the world strange, with ham-flowers and girls sprouting electrical outlets ( or -from the cover- dominoes with blackberries rather than dots), but the other side of it is admitting that much of the strangeness, some of the more horrifying bits of modern life, is our own doing.
She organizes her long series of poems, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future" in a sort of abecedaria, using the words "future" and "terror" as guideposts in getting her vocabulary, achieving a sort of sprung rhythm. "The Future of Terror" is militaristic and male while "The Terror of the Future" is more personal, female, but both are ill-at-ease in the current state of things. In the center of the book is a series of seven poems about Robo-boy. These poems, far from being a fanciful sci-fi digression, exemplify her empathy for objects as she goes about making a robot more alive than the people who populate her poems, people who have "glass-faces" and "slot-machine mouths" who get their words from teleprompters rather than as Robo-boy who learns about the word "subjectivity" by creating art. This also introduces her fascination with duality, of halving, of making one like the other or snipping this world from that in a sort of poetic shadowbox, even centaur-ing drawbridges and strawberries inventing strawbridges and drawberries.
You read Matthea Harvey not to help you understand the world, but to feel how strange it is, similar to the reasons for riding a teeter-totter. And like any partner in that noble endeavor she too will lean down on her end and leave you stranded in the air. The kicking and screaming will do you no good, but afterwards, when the wooziness is gone, you feel that there was something awfully fun in being there.
something Tiresome . December 29, 2007
9 out of 18 found this review helpful
There is something about the voice Harvey has in this collection that got very tiresome to me--something all too proper, too crafted, too cute & smooth around the edges. I liked her last book, Sad Breathing Machine, much more, & now I'm wondering if possibly my taste just changed
or
if actually her poems have become that much less exciting.
1 specific note : the 'Robo-Boy' poems are unbearable. My own personal mother would write the words 'Robo Boy' & find herself (mistakenly) to be very clever, she would.
(& certainly no offense to my mother but certainly she's no poet
& certainly I think we ought to expect more from poets shouldn't we
? something to find us
a little more unexpected ? (& glorious) or
am I off base here
?)
some of the poems were quite enjoyable nonetheless
this time around,
& some lines really made their mark, so I do give 3 stars of 5;
harvey is still more bearable than
most contemporary poets
despite the voice that has gradually become to annoy me.
one could
admittedly
do worse in selecting a book of poems.
my favorite here:
"Do You Understand?"
No grey
rainbow
over the
blackened
land.
 Astounding. October 25, 2007
4 out of 14 found this review helpful
This is Harvey's best book of poetry yet. The poems within it are haunting (in the spookiest sense of the word). I've been rereading them for weeks. The book as a whole offers a cohesive vision of the world that is quirky, frightening, engaging, and revelatory. This book is remarkably mature and remarkably honest, and it will linger with you long after you put it down.
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