Matt Rader’s debut collection is the fierce and tender retelling of our first “miraculous hours”—those early significant-and-strange interactions with the ones we love and the world we live in. From a world where wild dogs slide like ghosts into homes, water towers are “giant blue bullets unexploded in the earth” and walls are tortured to talk, Matt Rader forms a meticulously crafted reflection on how the events, experiences and environment of our early lives shape our sense of faith, our strongest convictions, and the map of the world we carry with us.

on the front porch striking matchsticks with our thumbs
the quick report of light doused out with our tongues,

it’s the trick that speaks volumes: forget phosphorus, friction
the miracle of combustion, it is how you hold fire

in your mouth then snuff it out like idle conversation—

–from “Miraculous Hours”

Praise for Miraculous Hours

"Very impressive... Rader has craft to burn and a compelling dark vision of life."
-Zachariah Wells, Quill & Quire

"Constructs a series of solid images and then takes them apart to see what makes them tick. It’s hard to believe this is Rader’s first book... The poet has the ability to see strange things, the quirky unseen details that might be difficult to mention... He documents that continuing sensual edge between the bright light and the burn."
-Jacqueline Turner, The Georgia Straight

"These poems are the work of an artist who sees things differently... [and] provide illuminating bursts of insights and recognition. This is brawny, challenging work."
-Statesman Journal, Salem, Oregon

"What's most striking about Rader's voice is the lack of attitudinizing; the brutal scenes he describes (the accidental crushing of a kitten's throat under a child's heel, a rape, a man hiding a dead body in the forest) are presented with respectful care and integrity, finished in language of high gloss... Rader's speaker possess the fragile lucidity of one who encounters the world in all its violence and beauty."
-Linda Besner, The Dominion

"...an environment loaded with both beauty and cruelty, where the unusual interactions between characters shape their perception of the world they live in... Rader’s speaker possesses a cold eye, able to accept the world as one filled with both beauty and violence. This impressive debut collection has me looking forward to what the future holds for this talented new poet."
-Greg Santos, PoetryReviews.ca

"With Miraculous Hours, Matt Rader has hit the ground running. The poetic voice is confident and for the most part the poems are admirably sure-footed. A kind of calm self-possessedness was the right note to strike. The pieces in this collection are not exactly recollections in tranquility, their often dramatic subjects and content requiring a cool hand at the switch to avoid the slide into melodrama. Rader's control of the language and tone mean that this largely works... In Rader's work, the urban and domestic is as much a wilderness as wilderness is, charged with discovery and danger."
-Karen Solie, Event

"This is the real and strange British Columbia, where rough-hewn frontage roads lead to ancient middens, and the fringes of every little town are choked with salal, fireweed, and abandoned logging equipment... Rader casts an uneasy eye on this subject matter, serving up neither an environmentalist's usual stew of rant and lament, nor any condescending canonization of the tough and sometimes wild people who necessarily populate such places... Rader [has] a keen eye for nature's hidden and blind machinations; an abundance of that rare poetic skill, knowing when to stop; and that virtue which matters most in fine poets, an evident but unflamboyant work ethic."
-Lyle Neff, Books In Canada

"Wondering about Matt Rader's influences, I get a powerful whiff of the dog-eat-dog dynamics of Golding's The Lord of the Flies, a lyrical quality reminiscent of Dylan and Credence Clearwater Revival, sometimes a sensibility akin to that of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, and moral punch and bucolic undertow of Steinbecks 'Of Mice and Men'. This is a book to read and re-read."
—Annie Freud, "How Ya Doon" Book Reviews