Sad Little Breathing Machine: Poems

as "intensely visual, mournfully comic and syntactically inventive," offers her second stunning collection

Units are the engines

I understand best.

One betrayal, two.

Merrily, merrily, merrily.

-from "Introduction to the World"

In Sad Little Breathing Machine, Matthea Harvey explores the strange and intricate mechanics of human systems-of the body, of thought, of language itself. These are the engines, like poetry, that propel both our ...