88 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Poetry / American-General | Poetry / Death, Grief, Loss | Poetry / Family
A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn’s String tells the story of a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy’s fractured, echoing voice—in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation—String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his.
Matthew Thorburn is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Grace of Distance, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the book-length poem Dear Almost, which won the Lascaux Prize.
“String is a stirring bravura performance, a love song and a song of war, a chronicle of damage, a testament to our capacity for perseverance.”—Michael Dumanis
“Matthew Thorburn’s String is a harrowing and tender unraveling of trauma, in which the brutal (dis)memberments of war are (re)membered through the point of view of a young boy. Here, string functions as mending, as artful stitching of the liminal—both a doing and an undoing, a narrativization of erasures through stories that are both silenced and then sung.”—Lee Ann Roripaugh
“No book has moved me as much as String, epic in scope but intimate as a lullaby. These poems remind us that life is not about the wish our hope makes as we toss a coin; it’s not that one side of the coin is despair and one side joy; it’s the constant flipping of the coin as it falls and the music it makes ringing against the sides of the empty well.”—Rhett Iseman Trull
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