"Matthew Burgess has a sharp ear, a tender eye, no sympathy for humorlessness, and a swift hand with enjambment. He knows how to end a line–with a bang, or a tease, or a curve. Amid these swerves, an air of insouciant recklessness mingles with a wistful fondness for misfits, for errant paths, for the eroticism of everything that's lost, faded, remote, and wrecked. Burgess holds his beguiling "I" in check by wit, dazzling splices, and flirtatious evasiveness. A phrase like 'a collage of phalluses / to squeegee before father returns' sets my internal thermostat to a temperature resembling joy." –Wayne Koestenbaum
