Matt Gano

 

 

 

 



This book reads a lot like love, if love wasn't such a wounded word. Matt Gano offers something proper. Pay attention.  He's playing a Jew's harp over a drum kit and keeping time with a deep sense of language. These poems hold place, they know where they're from, they earn their keep. Keep up. Suits for the Swarm moves my lips, and my feet.

 

Buddy Wakefield, Two-time Individual World Poetry Slam Champion, author of HENHOUSE and Gentleman Practice. 

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Matt Gano writes with, to, and from the heart.  At his best, he moves in the tradition of such masters of the narrative and lyric-narrative as Phil Levine and Gary Soto, blending humor, pathos, and wit to fine effect.  Gano is a music maker whose poems “pack punch like a third grade field trip.”  This book is serious business!

 

John Murillo, author of Up Jump The Boogie. 



​Matt Gano, whose swagger and soul and verbal dexterity have knocked out spoken-word audiences for years, brings his staggering inventiveness to the page—where he also, and absolutely, belongs. Here are irresistible scenes out of the sagebrush and empty lots of a charmed and timeless boyhood; love from all sides—wild-horse young, and 94 years old; and the moon: brilliant, unexpected, new, ‘with … lemon-meringue peaks/ and eating-contest complexion.’ These are beautifully-crafted poems, alive with startling transitions, humor, and the wisdom that lets ‘the rhythm in the ride be what I write.’ And they’re pure pleasure.

 

Kathleen Flenniken, Washington State Poet Laureate (2012)​, author of​ Plume​ and Famous