Matthew Henriksen's Ordinary Sun has been reviewed on New Pages today! If you haven't picked up the book yet, this review provides a lot of great excerpts to whet your appetite. After recent conversations discussing the accesibility of these poems, I think Patrick James Dunagan gets to the heart of what this book offers--vision and wonder reflected though surprising language.
The fact that Henriksen appears not concerned with knowing what to do with experience itself is one of the saving graces of his writing. His comfort to be caught up with wondering his way through puzzling detours presented by life via language affords him opportunity to weave the reader into the presence of being with the poem. He doesn’t push any agenda, but gives way to the visions of the poem that they be manifest...
If you're bored of agenda and ready to experience language, be sure to check out Ordinary Sun today.
Ordinary Sun was also reviewed in Tarpaulin Sky. Check it out!
Perhaps this is the true query of Henriksen's narrator posited as permeable—when in the urban landscape, one must take in both "natural" and "artificial" images with the same awe among throngs of others who absorb the same images, the same "kind of shit."