Doom Scroll: poems

by Matthew Guenette

Overview

Doom Scroll explores an anxious domesticity. These prose poems hedge toward moments of levity—a Joy Division song, a meal at Denny's, underwear draped over a fence "like a lurid dreamcatcher" —as a pandemic lockdown, busted politics, and other existential dreads loom in the margins.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629222332
Publisher:	University of Akron Press, The
Publication date:	02/28/2023
Series:	Akron Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	68
File size:	542 KB

About the Author

Matthew Guenette grew up in New Hampshire. He earned an MA in English from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University. He is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Vasectomania (2017), American Busboy (2011), and Sudden Anthem (2008). He lives in Madison, WI, with his wife, their two children, and a twenty-pound cat named Butternut.

Table of Contents

Love Will Tear Us Apart 1

Sticky Notes 3

Worst Punk Band 4

Awesome Dad 5

Cul-de-Sac 6

Rubber Chicken 7

Motivational Poster 8

Punk Song 9

Finger Roll 11

Lurid Dreamcatcher 12

Put It on a T-Shirt 13

Pigeon 14

Shipwreck 15

Your Results Aren't Good 16

I, Too, Have Been Unfaithful 17

Chicken Sandwich 18

Middle School Research Project 19

Seasons of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness 20

Space Smells Like Metal 21

Credit Card 22

I Against I 24

I Used to Be a Landscaper 25

A Wicked Case of Hiccups 27

Wormhole 28

Nuclear Volleyball 29

Discount Hand Grenades 30

Hazmat Suit 31

The Great Pyramids 33

Bigger Wave 35

You Sound Like Your Mother 37

This Guy from Turkey 38

Doom Scroll 40

A Quick Bedtime Story 41

GO TEAM! 42

Jack and Diane 44

Gutter Guy 45

Din 47

Disentanglement Puzzle 49

Folk Song 50

Back-To-School Supplies 51

Brother-In-Law 53

Eating My Peas 54

The Trojan Horse Appears in New Hampshire 55

Cancel Culture 57

Phoebe Bourassa 58

But We Still Have More Errands to Run 59

To the Lake 60

Trouble 61

Clouds 62

Yellow Rain Slicker 63

Acknowledgments 64

Editorial Reviews

Matthew Guenette has always been an original poet with a singular voice and these fine poems carry on that tradition. Doom Scroll unrolls as seamlessly as a well-plotted novel through a speaker—a bemused/baffled/befuddled one-time son who’s now a dad himself—who struggles to swim upstream in a world that’s running downstream. One feels the eternal push-pull between generations, from the life his father begat him to his own worries as a father and the siren call from his Gen-X self. These are poems for the twenty-first century, grappling with dilemmas that are at once quotidian and ontological.

Sarah Freligh

Matthew Guenette converts the now familiar gerund into a compound noun in his fourth collection, in which each poem assumes the shape of a slim, centered column. —Diego Báez, Poetry Foundation

From the Publisher

The speaker of these poems may be a dad from the Midwest, but this is not your average “American dad who buys a corvette to match the little dragon tattoo breathing fire down his back.” This book is more punk rock than that. In Doom Scroll, Matthew Guenette juxtaposes the absurdity of American politics with the untrustworthiness of TikTok influencers, offering the reader a wry and wickedly funny glimpse of what it means to parent against those forces: “My son did his middle school research project, he tried—he figured out there were experts who believed some things were real, and there were experts who believed those other experts were fake.” Showcasing lightning lyric speed, hyperbole, and heart, Doom Scroll charts the middle regions—middle-aged knees, middle American middle class McMansions, the up and down middle years of a marriage—with a Bankshot that doesn’t miss.

Marcus Wicker

In Doom Scroll, Matt Guenette is both the documentarian of a decaying, grinding world and its primary subject. Through his unequivocal lens, he charts an interiority anxious with drones, debt, overdue bills, conspiracy theorists, dueling yard signs, sticky notes, arguments with deceased parents, car warranties, clouds like junk mail, and bullets. And yet, there is the laughter of flowers. The thrash of honeysuckle. There are “rocks your kids / throw into a lake and there are rocks / the lake slowly throws back” and “a field of dandelions to break me in half.” There is so much tenderness here you may even feel, for a fleeting and sweet moment, like the end of the world is nowhere in sight. That is the gift of Matt Guenette’s poetry.

Ruth Awad