Description
Book SynopsisIn 2012 Matthew Wimberley took a two-month journey, traveling and living out of his car, during which time he had planned to spread his father's ashes. By trip's end, the ashes remained, but Wimberley had begun a conversation with his deceased father that is continued here in his debut collection.
Trade Review“Matthew Wimberley’s deeply intimate and lyrical collection
All the Great Territories maps a son’s journey through the landscapes of loss—through empty towns and black mountains and snow-covered fields. Forged by tender observations, these poems seek to uncover personal histories half-buried under layers of dirt and ash. They burn bright with elegy and longing for a father, a home, a memory of a life left behind.”—Vandana Khanna, author of
Train to Agra “The poems in this rich and incisive book are close-held and generous, in both detail and formal expression. Although the poet who has written these fine poems is young, he painfully recognizes the world he comes from is nearly lost. That is the blunt lot of rural America at the present moment. Thus, these poems have a moving, elegiac quality, but also, sublimely and through subtle implication, they acknowledge a hope, perhaps to come from the enduring land itself, where these poems of vital human experience are rooted. This is a book of knowledge, but it comes at us against our current grain, slowly, and in observable detail as it all happens in time.—Maurice Manning, author of
One Man’s Dark “We love how Matt Wimberley takes in the world, making an image-laden music. Like Wendell Berry and Larry Levis, he creates landscapes that enter the consciousness, sometimes healing it, sometimes breaking it open. Haunted by a father’s ghost, these poems sift through beauty and damage. We admire their compression and well-made lines, like the woods and mountains where they were written, though the title poem is a highway song, traveling the breadth of America, with its deserts and plateaus, red mud and tumbleweeds. In the soul tradition of Whitman, Kerouac, and Guthrie, these poems have heart.”—Dorianne Laux, author of
Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems, and Joseph Millar, author of
Kingdom
