Constellation Route

by Matthew Olzmann

Overview

Constellation Route uses the form of the letter to explore issues related to contemporary American society: the environment, race, love, grief, friendship, violence, and spirituality. The book is largely a metaphysical tribute to both the Post Office and the act of letter writing as a way to understand and create meaningful connections with the world at large.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948579230
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	01/18/2022
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems from Alice James Books: Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route. His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity and elsewhere. He’s been awarded fellowships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. Currently, he teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Table of Contents

Day Zero 1

1

Letter to Bruce Wayne 5

Letter to the Horse You Rode in on 8

Letter Written While Waiting in Line at Comic Con 10

The First Official Post Office of the American Colonies (1639) 12

Letter to the Person Who, During the Q&A Session after the Reading, Asked for Career Advice 13

Letter to Matthew Olzmann from Cathy Linh Che on Saintliness 15

Letter to the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America 17

Letter to a Cockroach, Now Dead and Mixed into a Bar of Chocolate 18

Letter to William Shatner 20

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czeslaw Milosz 23

Letter to a Bridge Made of Rope- 28

2

Psychopomp 33

Letter to David James 35

Questions for Matthew Olzmann from Jessica Jacobs about Imposter Syndrome among the Thorns and Thistles 37

Letter to Justin, Age Seven, Regarding Any Possible Mixed-Race Anxieties Which One Might Experience in the Near or Distant Future 39

Fourteen Letters to a 52-Hertz Whale 41

Letter to Matthew Olzmann from a Flying Saucer 44

Letter to Steve Orlen- 45

Phantom Route 46

Letter to Jennifer Chang and Evan Rhodes Regarding a Variation in the Fabric of Time 48

Letter to My Future Neighbors 51

Letter to a Man Drowning in a Folktale 53

Letter to a Canyon 56

3

Letter to Matthew Olzmann from the Roman Empire 61

Letter to the Connecticut River Monster 63

The Dead Letter Office 65

Letter to a Man Who, within a Year of Being Struck by Lightning, Had Previously Been Hit by a Cement Truck and Bitten by a Tarantula 67

Letter to Jamaal May Regarding the Existence of Unicorns 69

Letter to Larry Levis 71

Letter to Matthew Olzmann from Ross White, Re: The Tardigrade 72

Letter to Matthew Olzmann, Sent Telepathically from a Flock of Pigeons While Surrounding Him on a Park Bench in Detroit, Michigan 74

Wing Case 77

Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America 79

Letter to Matthew Olzmann from a Traffic Light in Durham, North Carolina 80

4

Constellation Route 85

Return to Sender 88

Letter to My Car's Radiator 89

Letter to Matthew Olzmann from Mike Scalise Concerning Love and Echoes 91

Daylight Container 93

Letter to a Younger Version of Myself Who Had Never Known Hunger 94

Some Notes from Vievee on the Kindness of Shepherds 97

Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now 100

An Offering 101

Conversion 103

Notes 107

Acknowledgments 111

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/15/2021

Conceived as the assembled contents of a mail carrier’s pouch, the intimate and affecting third book by Olzmann (Contradictions in the Design) presents the poet as sender, receiver, and courier. He marvels at the medium’s special delivery: "This always stuns me: the way an envelope arrives; how we/ still reach toward one another, how this correspondence/ endures: one figure approaches your door with a satchel/ full of sand, pigeon feathers, sorrows, and names." Letters to and from poets and friends are interwoven with poems of unconventional dispatch: "Letter to My Car’s Radiator," "Letter to a Bridge Made of Rope," and "Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in America." Topics range widely from poetic craft to racial identity and the climate crisis. Arcane facts and technical vocabulary drawn from the history of the U.S. postal service (itself an endangered institution) flower into metaphor: day zero, wing case, phantom route, daylight container—"How impossible is this: to reach across time/or oceans to say the one thing you need to say?" In language at once direct and artful, Olzmann memorably explores the question of how one might speak across the gulfs dividing humankind. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A Rumpus Poetry Book Club Pick for November 2021
Longlisted for the 2022 Julie Suk Award

"In Constellation Route, we see an epistolary poetics that brings into sharp focus individual, interpersonal, and societal concerns, and that centers self-awareness and reciprocity as community-reinforcing principles."
—Issam Zineh, Hopkins Review

“Conceived as the assembled contents of a mail carrier’s pouch, the intimate and affecting third book by Olzmann (Contradictions in the Design) presents the poet as sender, receiver, and courier. … In language at once direct and artful, Olzmann memorably explores the question of how one might speak across the gulfs dividing humankind.”
—Publishers Weekly

“It is Olzmann’s talent—possibly his obsession—at finding meaning in the patterns of disparate elements of the universe that makes this a book I couldn’t put down.”
—Risa Denenberg, Poetry Northwest

“Olzmann’s work is vibrant, tender, and, above all, honest about the loneliness of being ostracized from the world and ourselves. … He writes to the dead, to canyons and trees, to river monsters, with language that reverberates like the grooves of a Motown record playing for an audience who, like the barkeep in “The First Official Post Office of the American Colonies (1639)”, can listen in to feel the pure expression of loss and love.”
—D.C. Eichelberger, The Arkansas International

"Olzmann’s approach is direct, unpretentious, deceptively literal-minded: a subject is broached—Comic Con, unicorns, a younger version of himself—and made to render its meaning or its absurdity."
—David Woo, The Poetry Foundation

"Poet Matthew Olzmann’s imaginative and inviting new collection, Constellation Route (Alice James), is, in its varied way, a celebration of the postal service and the art of letter writing. His addressees are wide-ranging: a pine tree, a cockroach, William Shatner, a bridge made of rope, a gone friend. The warmth and generosity of his tone remind a reader what a thing it is to be reached out to, to “talk to people who will understand you."
—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe

“…a metaphysical tribute to both the Post Office and the act of letter writing as a way to understand and create meaningful connections with the world at large.”
—Alan Chong Lau, iExaminer

"I would like to lease a plot of land in Matthew Olzmann's imagination. I would like especially to shelter-in-place inside his newest collection, Constellation Route. Each poem is, symbolically, a star—and also, often, a letter, elegy, and ode. Some of my favorite words appear in this book—salamander, psychopomp, incinerate, quibble, foist, satchel, and caterwaul among them. Between these covers you'll find a Wonderland of inventive language, profound image-making, and a missive to every reader of much-needed, radical joy."
—Julie Marie Wade

“Matthew Olzmann has long been a poet of exceptional wisdom and his latest collection is revelatory. Each poem reaches beyond the interior landscape to address the other in timely and intimate dialogues that bend, reframe, surprise, and ultimately embrace. Deeply perceptive, this series of epistolary poems are offerings to a new age in need of understanding where we are going, where we have been, and more importantly, what do we do for each other once we’ve reached our destination.”
—Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth

“In Constellation Route, Matthew Olzmann’s sublimely playful imagination figures the poet as part Hermes, a conductor of dreams and messages; part Charon, guide to the underworld; and part United States Postal worker. It’s a funny word, ‘correspondence,’ one that Olzmann explores—its etymological routes—to reveal a cosmos of exchanges that delivers absurdity as easily as it delivers the comfort of our familiars. Olzmann makes these appointed rounds with humor, awe, and grace.”
—Gregory Pardlo

From the Publisher