Wonderland

by Matthew Dickman

Overview

Matthew Dickman engages the traces of his own living past in poems that “light both heart and mind” (David Kirby, New York Times).

In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Matthew Dickman’s youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. Ghosts of longing, shame, and vulnerability haunt these luminous, hypnotic poems as Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, and confining definitions of identity. Wonderland reminds us that in neighborhoods filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, we can also find innocence and love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393634075
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Matthew Dickman is the award-winning author of Wonderland, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and All-American Poem, winner of the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

01/01/2018
Life falls far short of wonderful in Dickman's autobiographical, Peanuts-eye view of growing up in working-class 1980s Portland, OR. While adults are largely absent—and abusive or indifferent when present—their children are out skateboarding, teasing guard dogs, and bullying other kids. One chronically violent childhood friend even grows up to be a white supremacist ("He must feel/ so safe in his skin./ He must feel like he belongs"). Dickman's own perspective is that of the victim trying to survive, grow, and be receptive to whatever small pleasures are possible ("Who looks at something empty and doesn't think about what/ they could fill it with? No one."). His ability not only to recollect but also to relive his childhood in the present moment, as if boy and man coexisted and conversed with each other ("you will have to/ stay in your body for much longer/ than you really want to."), manifests a hard-won wisdom that 13 somewhat contrived experiments—a series of anaphoric improvisations on the hours of the day—can't diminish. VERDICT More grounded and less flashy than its two predecessors (e.g., Mayakovsky's Revolver), Dickman's latest offers some surprisingly affective moments within its harsh, dystopian milieu. For larger poetry and some YA collections.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal

01/15/2018
“I am always doing this. Walking around the old neighborhood, always/ sixteen, moody and stealing cigarettes,” writes Dickman (Mayakovsky’s Revolver) in a collection concerned with those liminal, adolescent years when the forward motion of growing up is both necessary and dangerous. The poems are ferocious and hardened by a backdrop of addiction and poverty. Dickman recalls his sister battling addiction while taking care of him and his twin brother, “her heart like a sack of rabbits, skull-sized/ motors in the dark,” and a neighborhood where the “men happen to the women/ and the women happen to the children,” with each new day arriving “like a van/ with its windows// painted black.” A series of poems marked by the hour runs through the collection, beginning at one a.m. and progressing in stages to midnight. Here, Dickman departs from his broader narrative using chant-like anaphora: “This amphibian inner-organ green./ This smoke./ This pillowcase and razors and salt and trying to be a human being.” For Dickman, the wilderness of youth becomes a kind of wonderland: “when I think of the second grade I think about fall leaves,/ black oaks, and urine.” In Dickman’s poems, readers observe as the bright-eyed potential of youth is shattered by the devastation of adulthood’s onset. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"There is an unabashed rapture to these poems about ordinary American life in the analog age. How astounding, and how perfectly troubling, to be led through this fearsome, familiar realm of choked silences and violent collisions by an intelligence as deft and buoyant as Matthew Dickman’s."

Tracy K. Smith

"With Wonderland, Matthew Dickman captures the vicissitudes of childhood: the mess and wildness of it all, how we are both held and discarded, the way darkness subsumes the glow and vice versa. Dickman’s poems are deft and sparkling and never cease to tear into you with their profound rawness and beauty."

Carrie Brownstein

"A wonderful new poetic voice writing warm and cozy visions of old Portland, Oregon. I loved it."

Gus Van Sant

"My first thought about the poems in Matthew Dickman’s new collection, Wonderland, was: Why doesn’t every poet write this way? . . . I wish others wrote with Dickman’s clarity and ability to engage. . . . these poems light both heart and mind."

New York Times - David Kirby

"Tender and troubling, dark and glowing. . . . [F]ull of glimpses of sudden violence and hidden traumas, which often simultaneously mix with tenderness, love and indeed a certain sense of wonder."

San Francisco Chronicle