Butterflies Lost Within The Crooked Moonlight

by Matt Nagin

Overview

This highly-accessible, dynamic collection offers existential ponderings, comic situations, poetic meditations on death, musical riffs, political commentary, striking imagery and more. The 45 poems in this collection represent a range of styles and subject matter. 18 of these poems were previously published in such journals as Antigonish Review, Grain Magazine, Arsenic Lobster, Dash, Spillway, The Charles Carter, Downtown Brooklyn, and many, many more. This debut collection of poetry from Matt Nagin is sure to, as the title suggests, comment on the way even the most delicate and majestic of us tend to be drawn, willy-nilly, towards the crooked moonlight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781545101285
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	05/26/2017
Pages:	62
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.13(d)

About the Author

Matt Nagin is an author, educator, actor, filmmaker and standup comedian. He has been published in Writer's Digest, The New York Post, Mic, The Humor Times, The Higgs-Weldon, Grain Magazine, Arsenic Lobster, The Charles Carter, Dash, Antigonish Review and many, many more.

He also wrote and directed his first short film, "Inside Job," which premiered at The Mediterranean Film Festival Cannes, where it won Best Short Film.

More info at mattnagin.com

Editorial Reviews

2017-10-24
Nagin's verse is a torrent, and readers will thrill as it carries them off. This poetry collection—which tackles themes of art, authenticity, and desire—is as energetic as it is infectious. The author tackles many themes but seems especially concerned with craft—poetry about the struggle to write great poetry. The best adjective for describing his most effective verse is "breathless," and it often seems that Nagin is so possessed by his subject that his words pour out: "The wounds leak out my chest like sparrows / like cantankerous verbiage like masks at a / carnival like the time I lost my keys like margins / of error like you looking like an emu solving a / rubix cube like mysticism at the birthplace / of eternity." The "leak" in the first line quickly becomes a rush, and soon enough we're not reading Nagin's words, we're riding them. Such passages recall the early work of the Beats; Kerouac and Ginsberg also understood poetry as effusion, and Nagin seems to have learned much from these countercultural icons. This author is no one-trick pony, however, and his other pieces are sparer, more condensed. The middle of "Poems from the Head" is a thin string of fragments: "Poems from the gut / new endeavors / Poems that strut / magical stew. / Poems defy / swirling black rivers / desperately / desperately / carrying through." The lines here are so fleeting that we almost miss the touching rhyme of "stew" and "through." This is the poet writing in the gnomic mode, but the fact that Nagin can work so persuasively in both registers is a testament to his estimable skill.Powerful verse from a writer of real talent.

Kirkus Reviews