Matt Thomas Poetry
Matt Thomas Poetry
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I write poetry about the art and practice of home. The bird nest in the banner photo was made a few Springs ago on one of the rungs of an old ladder on the back of my ramshackle shed. Someday that will be a poem: the ladder at rest, the randomly beautiful and technical tangle of sticks, the defeated outbuilding. To me, poetry is a lot like science. It begins with the practice of observation and seeks repeatable outcomes. Poetry helps us get by, get along maybe asking a few more questions of ourselves and our world than we would have otherwise.
Available Now: Disappearing by the Math
In my first full-length poetry collection, Disappearing by the Math, the future and past coexist, Walmarts and post offices become locations of existential revelation, and God peers from the details like a cat from the weeds.
It’s hard to know which way is up these days. No matter where you are or how you look at it, there is so much in this world that is confounding and confusing at the moment … which why a collection of writing like Matt Thomas’s Disappearing by Math comes as both a relief and a joy. Thomas meets us in the experience of this struggle, and plainly and patiently voices what it means to be human right here, right now.”
– Kusi Okamura
Disappearing by the Math is available in paperback or e-book online. Or you can order a copy through the friends at your local bookstore (ISBN 1774032880).
Coming Soon: Cicada, Dog & Song
My second full-length poetry collection, Cicada, Dog & Song, will be published in late 2025 by Serving House Books. ‘Cicada…’ explores the concept of cycle as framework for our spiritual, material, and emotional lives by way of three representations: cicada, dog, and song. Amelia Mangham (@amelia.art23) painted an incredible cover and poets William Miller and Renee Nicholson have provided jacket blurbs so we’re just about ready to go!
Coming Soon: Foxy Love: All-American Poems
A third collection, Foxy Love: All American Poems, will be published in the Spring of 2026 by Kelsay Books. ‘Foxy Love’ is a chapbook length collection that explores American identity apart from slogans and the dichotomy of our politics, and as product of our everyday lives rather than ideology. I’ve received permission from the National AIDS Memorial to use their incredible digital image of the AIDS Quilt on the cover and have secured jacket blurbs from poet and novelist Andrew K. Clark and poet Jennifer Sutherland. So things are coming together!
Some recent publications …
King of the Road, in Pinhole Poetry
I’m fascinated by the way that reality is constructed and sensed. Our days happen to us, and we look back and think what was that? Our brains never want to see anything simply – we are all magical realists.
Newborn shadows jump from the reaching cedars / as the truck passes what do you see? Anything you can imagine / No cure, yet the sun rises beneath pond ice, above, mallards become smoke.
Dreams are mud on the belly of the pony.
– an excerpt from King of the Road
My daily life is anchored by substantial realities: barn chores, engineering problems at work, weather. But every instance happens in the past, and once an event is consigned to memory, anything goes! The most mundane things become unicorns in recollection.
Tasseography, in the engine(idling
I’m a romantic. I don’t know many people who aren’t. Humans are overall hopeful animals. I feel the most optimistic in those in between times like twilight or pre-dawn, where nothing is established and so anything can happen.
no one tells you about the twilight / how important it is to seeing / the softness of being between one thing and another, how luck floats the dregs, penumbra, light begged and teased from the murk of promises and expectations
–an excerpt from Tasseography
I consider luck to be part of the physics of our natural world;. I don’t know how it works, but it exists. This poem is about hopefulness, luck, and love.
We say the word love a lot but I think that love is a practice, not an instance. When we say, ‘I love you,’ we are saying, ‘I’m committing to the craft of you.’ Like craft, the richness of love derives from its longevity and inconsistency. As Hopkins wrote, ‘glory be to God for dappled things.’
Consider the Day, in Susurrus Magazine
Gary Snyder wrote of carp, ‘old fat fish of everlasting life.’ It’s difficult to find a better description. My father, more than maybe anything else, was a fisherman. I grew up fishing with him, and ponds and streams are special places for me. Each body of water is a distinct ecosystem; a self-contained world. We have a spring fed pond on our property that’s too cold and shallow for most fish. But Koi love it. They cruise around year to year growing ever larger and weathering drought and freeze and herons.
Thousands of mosquito larvae wiggle beneath the glass of surface tension / spotted with locust petals / Slowly spinning, coming to rest / against water lettuce hiding / fat, frowning goldfish / scales like hot, strange alloys.
-an excerpt from Consider the Day
I’ve been a casual practitioner of Zen since I read ‘Buddha in Blue Jeans’ in college. Most fish are exemplary Buddhists, living precisely in the moment. Unlike most people, who are constantly filtering experience through the past and future. This poem is a kind of diagram of a human experience, which is always a many faceted dream of sensory input, memory, imagination, hopes, fears ….. all of it manufactured and well, dead. As I write,
...a daydream
also smelling of vegetable heat
and in it rain like
a whiff of dead cloud animal
beneath the bougainvillea.
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