Curare

• Curare
• Price: $16.00
• 978-1-949540-36-9
• September 15, 2022
• Poetry - PB
• Pages - 88
• Lucian Mattison

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Winner of the C&R Press 2021 Poetry Award

Lucian Mattison’s poetry collection, Curare, is a work about remembering our humanity in the face of the destabilizing and dehumanizing forces of technology, climate change, and capitalism. The image-rich poems delight in the odd and off-kilter while walking an informal lyrical path through landscapes of the speculative, quotidian, urban, naturalistic, folkloric, and dream-like. At their core, the poems acknowledge the tragedy of humanity’s self-made tools of destruction and, at once, ask us to hope that these same tools can become remedies—the arrow poison transformed into healing salve when picked apart and dosed.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“In Curare, Lucian Mattison has created a poetry of poignant beauty and displacement. The language is deceptively readable while simultaneously obliging readers to reconsider almost everything in their lives. It is hard to resist being drawn into the crucible of his sharp juxtapositions, which bring us back to attention the way slamming on the brakes snaps us out of the daily stupor of traffic. Given where we are, wandering the aftermath of a deadly pandemic and watching the horrors of a war just begun, these are the poems that we need—pressing us to ask ‘What have we won // that doesn’t hurt/ us?’”
–Tim Seibles, author of Fast Animal, 2012 National Book Award Finalist

“In his most recent collection Curare, Lucian Mattison delivers the goods as expected: poems soaked in the rich oil of existence and bursting with the throb of many worlds; and a voice that leads readers through characteristic turns of thoughtfulness layered beneath tightly focused moments. But these poems are perhaps even more deeply tinged with the ethos of our time—and as the old-new terrors of the world poise arrows dipped in resinous poison, we are most ripe to fresh wounding. Or, as the poet reminds us, we can look for a cure; we can rest, preserve; we can air out our griefs and angers. It’s no small thing to forestall the desire to proclaim that all our business here is ‘finished, to believe there is still ‘so much afterlife/ to look forward to.” Lucian’s poems take us to that threshold of possibility.”
–Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (2020), and 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia