We Fell Into Weather

Poetry. At heart conceptual and formally experimental, Alexandra Mattraw’s WE FELL INTO WEATHER creates visual and sonic textures that link toxicity–environmental, historical, domestic–with neurodivergence and disease. These poems are alive with musicality and internal rhyme, ‘the way hay rips scars into wrists the way granite / fields bloom back bruises, ‘ while offering glimpses into the stuff of everyday life–the toddler’s cough, the broken lamp taped back together. In Mattraw’s spare and elegant lines, an image will crystallize briefly as a family drives away from California wildfires, but then disperse like vapor, like ‘ash…Rend[s] the visibility of air.’ Attuned to the sublime in nature and in language, this is a poet who invites our close and sustained attention, who invites us to improve ourselves.–Mary-Kim Arnol