The Others

by Matthew Rohrer

Overview

A gripping, eerie, and hilarious novel-in-verse from poet Matthew Rohrer. In a Russian-doll of fictional episodes, we follow a midlevel publishing assistant over the course of a day as he encounters ghost stories, science fiction adventures, Victorian hashish eating, and robot bigfoots. Rohrer mesmerizes with wildly imaginative tales and resonant verse in this compelling love letter to storytelling.

this night
they all seemed asleep
for a while the stark shadows
held me
only my mind moved

wildly behind my eyes
until I heard a tiny
song coming from the driver
song of a bandit’s broken
heart, song of his betrayal
I slept and dreamed I was awake

Matthew Rohrer is the author of Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940696416
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	05/02/2017
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Matthew Rohrer is the author of Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.

Editorial Reviews

02/15/2017
This novel-in-verse by Rohrer, a National Poetry Series winner whose most recent title was Destroyer and Preserver (he is also collaborated with Wave editor in chief Joshua Beckman on multiple projects, including 2002's Nice Hat. Thanks) centers on an ineffectual publishing company employee who consumes words for a living, including the constant working-class, shut-up-and-do-it advice from his wife and father that repeats in his head. As this book begins, the protagonist is opening Confessions of the Truly High, "a Victorian-era verse autobiography." Later, he sneaks into a church to read The Others, a work roughly about ghosts, and later still he dips into L'Enchanteur, a French text about altered states, and so on. Essentially, Rohrer's newest is a book of narratives about narratives. A source of great confusion is the poet's decision to call this a novel-in-verse when in fact it seems more like prose hacked into arbitrary lines (a pitfall the poet James Wright warned against years ago), so unlike the late David Rakoff's skillfully forged poem-novel Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. VERDICT For ambitious poetry collections and established Rohrer fans.—Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH

Library Journal

The Others unfolds in layers of both complexity of content and technique, beginning in a seemingly simple, straightforward way, developing deeper ideas behind the scenes. . . . Thankfully, Rohrer's skillful storytelling never leaves the reader behind, no matter how far off course from the morning commute his protagonist travels.
Andrew Miller, Yes Poetry

Tumbling from one speaker to the next, Matthew Rohrer’s dreamlike novel-in-verse harkens back to a time when poetic language was used, principally, to tell stories. It is experimental and strange but not in a way that alienates its readers. Whether Rohrer’s characters are riding the F train in midtown Manhattan, high in nineteenth-century France, or fending off robot bigfeet, his masterful attention to detail and rhythm absorbs and engages. Each narrative emerges from the one that precedes it, like a Russian nesting doll, producing a sensation of spacious expansion and laying bare the manner by which narratives absorb and give birth to each other. This is a book of trapdoors and weird trips and special delights.
—The Believer, Believer Book Award Notification

Wonderfully ambitious and fully realized, Rohrer's The Others engages similar questions of readerly participation and, more specifically, the cultivation of a shared consciousness through art. In the book's sprawling fictive terrain, the constant presence of the other within the self—that eternal alterity—is a shadow story that haunts the narrative proper. As the work unfolds, it is this secret, hidden most of all from the speaker of the poem, that is gradually revealed, understood, and dramatized beautifully in the style of the writing itself.
—Kristina Marie Darling, Los Angeles Review of Books

Reading this book is like opening a door to a room and then opening a door within that room to another room and then opening a door within that room to another room and then—you get the point. It’s also: funny, mind-altering, occasionally spooky, and a conceptually brilliant reminder that our lives are filled with stories every single day.
—Allie Wuest, Catapult

You should read The Others. It'll do things to you.
John Maher, Publishers Weekly, staff pick

From the Publisher