Mezzanines

Matthew Olzmann

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781948579957
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"There’s something inherently spiritual about Olzmann’s Mezzanines.... It’s a place of reflection and contemplation, a temporary reprieve from the world’s chaos and a reach for a vision of paradise." — The Los Angeles Review of Books

"...the poems [in Mezzanines ] have doors that open and invite you inside. The rooms of the house may be odd, and the stairwells may lead in strange directions, but you, as the reader, remain beckoned. [Olzmann] hasn’t invited you in just to leave you. He’s got stories to tell, and they’re good.” — The Huffington Post Blog

There is no place Matthew Olzmann doesn’t visit in his poignant debut. From underwater to outer space, Mezzanines is a contained universe, constantly shifting through multiple perceptions of the surreal and the real. A lyrical conversation with mortality, Olzmann explores identity, faith, and our sense of place, with an acute awareness of our minute existence.

From "NASA Video Transmission Picked Up By Baby Monitor":

How many shadows are there left to name?
Logophobia is the fear of words. Keraunothnetophobia
is the fear of falling man-made satellites.
Imagine this last one:
you walk outside and look to heaven
expecting a sky lab plunging down on you—wires
everywhere, bolts loosening, metal body in flames.
Instead, you see only blue, endless blue,
the color of a baby’s new blanket, cloaking everything.

Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for the InsideOut Literary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the editors of the following publications in which these poem, sometimes in different forms, first appeared:

Atlanta Review	“Alternate Sources of Fuel”
BODY	“A River, Briefly Parallel to an Eight-Lane Super Highway”
Boxcar Poetry Review	“NASA Video Transmission Picked Up by Baby Monitor”
	“While Scratching My Wife’s Back, I Calculate the Distance Between Sky and Earth”
The Cortland Review	“The Man Who Looks Lost as He Stands in the Sympathy Card Section of Hallmark”
	“How Much”
CURA	“Spock as a Metaphor for the Construction of Race During My Childhood”
failbetter.com	“Previous Theories on the Body”
H_NGM_N	“Torque”
Inch	“The Days”
Ink Node	“Photograph of a Boy and a Dead Dog”
The Kenyon Review	“Was Blind, But Now”
Kenyon Review Online	“When He Weighs Only His Right Foot”
Margie	“Man Robs Liquor Store, Leaves Résumé”
Mead	“To the One at the Bottom of Loch Ness”
The Minnesota Review	“Dead Beetles Stuffed with Cocaine”
New England Review	“Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion”
	“The Tiny Men in the Horse’s Mouth”
The Normal School	“Names of Actual Places You’ll Pass on Your Way to Building a New Life”
No Tell Motel	“Bigfoot and the Placebo Effect”
	“The Love Story”
	“Protocol of Angels”
	“The Antiquary”
On Earth As It Is	“For a Recently Discovered Shipwreck at the Bottom of Lake Michigan”
Poetry Northwest	“Notes Regarding Happiness”
	“Hello Earth,”
	“Planetarium with Deformed Elephants”
Provincetown Arts	“Revisions”
Rattle	“Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem”
	“Rare Architecture”
RHINO	“Years Later, I Introduce My Brother to Person X, and Am Asked If I Was Adopted”
The Southern Review	“Art of the Mime: An Educational Camp for Children”
Sou’wester	“Snake Charming”

Thank you to the following teachers, mentors, friends and organizations who provided valuable support and guidance toward the making of these poems:

Kundiman, Sarah Gambito, Joseph Legaspi, Jennifer Chang, Vikas Menon, Oliver de la Paz, The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Debra Allbery, Stephen Dobyns, Steve Orlen, Martha Rhodes, Brooks Haxton, Heather McHugh, C. Dale Young, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Ross White, Tua Chaudhuri Bultje, Nicole Trigg, Tarfia Faizullah, Dilruba Ahmed, Robert Fanning, Jamaal May, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Allen Shapiro, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tom Sleigh, Robin Ekiss, Kelli Russell Agodon, David James, The Kresge Arts Foundation, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Terry Blackhawk and the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, Dan McKernan, Springfed Arts, Mary Jo Firth Gillett and her Tuesday night workshop, Frank Giampietro, Meg Willing, Carey Salerno, and Alice James Books.

–For Vievee

ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

—SAMUEL BECKETT
Waiting for Godot

NASA V...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Dedication
• NASA Video Transmission Picked Up by Baby Monitor
• Hello Earth,
• The Tiny Men in the Horse’s Mouth
• Spock as a Metaphor for the Construction of Race During My Childhood
• Planetarium with Deformed Elephants
• Bigfoot and the Placebo Effect
• Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes
• The Hand That Taps the Names into Gravestones
• 93,000,000 Miles from the Sun
• The Melting Pot in Housewares Has a Slight Crack
• Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem
• Was Blind, But Now
• Torque
• Art of the Mime: An Educational Camp for Children
• Snake Charming
• The Rug
• The Witness Garden
• Alternate Sources of Fuel
• Notes Regarding Happiness
• Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion
• Revisions
• The Man Who Looks Lost as He Stands in the Sympathy Card Section of Hallmark
• The Antiquary
• Dead Beetles Stuffed with Cocaine
• The Days
• Man Robs Liquor Store, Leaves Resume
• How Much
• While Scratching My Wife’s Back, I Calculate the Distance Between Sky and Earth
• Rabbits
• When He Weighs Only His Right Foot
• Gas Station on Second Street, Detroit
• Photograph of a Boy and a Dead Dog
• A River, Briefly Parallel to an Eight-Lane Super Highway
• Small Resurrection
• Previous Theories on the Body
• Protocol of Angels
• For a Recently Discovered Shipwreck at the Bottom of Lake Michigan
• Breathing Water
• The Love Story
• Years Later, I Introduce My Brother to Person X, and Am Asked If I Was Adopted
• To the One at the Bottom of Loch Ness
• Names of Actual Places You’ll Pass on Your Way to Building a New Life
• Crocodiles
• Rare Architecture
• The Size of the Earth and That Which It Contains