Living Things
Written in the year after the birth of Matt Rader's first daughter, Living Things honestly introduces the contradictions of the modern world: "how what we see in daylight is less than whole / and also more so." Using words in lieu of sonar, these poems bounce off the ecology of "shabby saturated grasses" and "panther-eyed armies of salal," and locate both author and reader within a literary genealogy. Matt Rader's poetry brings subtle slowness to a chaotic, fast-paced environment. It is both celebration and documentation of this world and its relationship to all living things.
Released 2008
“Matt Rader's Living Things features poems that are essentially catalogues of experience. There's a Witmanesque interest in singing of everyday things, but within the constraints of form, including rhyme that's almost invisible ... Rader loves the sound of words and the shapes of poems ... simply lovely imagery ... Living Things thrives.”
–George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald
“There's movement and passion in these precisely built poems. Rader throws off sparks from first to last here...Rader is a Wordsworthian, contemplative, lofty-voiced poet by nature. But at some key points in Living Things he ceases to muse, gets wild, and starts driving big poetic ideas home with sonic collision, and big emotions. Great phrases leap from nearly every piece ... Living Things is crammed with slant-rhymed thirteen-line sonnets, wonky near-ghazals and suchlike conventional subversions--Rader is becoming a useful Canadian poet because he can declaim in pretty plain language. ... Matt Rader always had style, dudes. He's added some juice and jump now, and bowls strike after heavy strike in this terrific volume.”
–Lyle Neff, sub-Terrain
“Rader has quickly gone from being a poet to watch to one of the poets to watch.”
–Zachariah Wells, Arc
“Matt Rader's Living Things is an astounding, thought-provoking, and visceral collection of poetry... Rader's affectively charged, insouciant verse alongside my experience really underscored those moments, those snapshots that capture an energy amidst an unknowingness or an absurdity that, at the end of the day, reminds us of the spontaneity and fragility of life. Oprah, anyone?”
–Mike Sloane, Mondo Magazine
“A poet who can do woodstoves and chain saws, Matt Rader, who grew up in Comox and now lives in Oregon, is not a nature faddist. Living Things is a slim volume that shows a highly familiar knowledge of trees, plants and birds which did not get picked up by browsing a field guide... Sit with one of Rader's tree poems, close the book, close your eyes, and there is his exact tree.”
–Hannah Main-van der Kamp, BC BookWorld
“The world must usually be a beautiful place in Matt Rader's world. His latest book of poems, Living Things, is a gentle but passionate tribute to nature.”
–Parksville-Qualicum Beach News
“Bringing a certain gentle kindness to a hostile world, the lyrical verse of Living Things is entertaining all the way through. Highly recommended for community library poetry collections and poetry lovers in general.”
–Small Press Bookwatch, Wisconsin
“Rader writes with alacrity, and the sense of a mind shaping experience into orders of living and dying, of birth and growth, reveals itself throughout the book.”
–Marc Thackray, Journal of Canadian Poetry