Things We Don't Know We Don't Know

by Matthew T. Mason

Overview

Original poetry by the Omaha Nebraska Master of Slam.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780976523185
Publisher:	The Backwaters Press
Publication date:	03/28/2006
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.18(d)

About the Author

After earning his MA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis, Matt Mason, of course, moved to Omaha where Mason lives with his wonderful wife Sarah and baby daughter Sophia.Over 100 magazines and anthologies have published his poems, including Laurel Review, Prairie Schooner, The Morpo Review, and the online edition of Mississippi Review. New Michigan Press released his chapbook Mistranslating Neruda in 2003; not to be outdone, Lone Willow Press put out When The Bough Breaks in 2005.

Mason has read poetry everywhere from behind the podiums of the Nebraska Book Festival to the stages of the National Poetry Slam as well as at universities, high schools, libraries, book stores, radio shows, state fairs, art museums, bars, ice cream parlors, and coffee shops across the country, even appearing as the stand-in for Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and Oscar winning director Alexander Payne at rehearsals for the opening of a performing arts center. He was appointed an Admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska by Governor Mike Johanns in 2004, enjoy donuts, and sometimes do write about cows.

What People are Saying About This

Marjorie Saiser

"The only thing better than reading these poems is to hear Matt Mason himself read them."
—author of Bones of a Very Fine Hand

David Clewell

"Although Mason takes his title from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's nonclarification of U.S. policy regarding "the war on terror," this exuberant poet helps us to see clearly a cornucopia of things we too often forget we know. Whether turning his attention to kiwifruit, Wild Kingdom's Marlin Perkins, the Strategic Air Command Museum, or lovers who with luck may come to resemble a no-expiration-date snack cake, Mason sheds some of his Nebraskan light on our universally human proceedings. And anyone who can actually say, for the poem-record, "I believe that aliens built the Pyramids, Stonehenge, / and most of my ex-girlfriends" surely knows, by heart, a few morethings we only think we may be better off not knowing."
—author of Now We're Getting Somewhere and The Low End of Higher Things

Michael Burke

"Rebel With a Cause - Matt Mason is a revolutionary. And not just when he's writing about vigorous political outrage (the title of his new collection is from a Donald Rumsfeld quote). Even Mason's poems filled with gentle insight, kindness, humor and grace are small, feisty acts of rebellion - crystallizing a new way of thinking, feeling, behaving."

Rigoberto Gonzolez

"Matt Mason must be declared the poet laureate of the Midwest! No other native son celebrates the overlooked America, its unsung citizens (from the anonymous poets to the part-time English teachers), and its expansive indigenous landscape, as well as he does. Mason's poetry is humorous when he wants to be quirky, heartbreaking when he wants to be eloquent, and though he moves effortlessly into other moods and geographies, he always returns to his first and most enduring love (and to what he knows best)-his homeland."
—author of So Often The Pitcher Goes to Water Before It Breaks