The others too./ We fell backward into dreaming.” Oh, to be a bird here, a sad and beautiful place you won’t want to leave. Matthea Harveys Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. Sad Little Breathing Machine(Graywolf, 2004), and Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007).

She teaches at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn. Matthea Harvey is the author of three books of poetry, Pity the Bathtub. Prose poems about mermaids are paired with bizarre silhouettes of half-woman-half-tool creatures miniature chairs and figurines are frozen in blocks of ice and then photographed and an erasure of a Rad Bradbury text is remade into a sad and sparse tale of a Martian, a “dirty flub funny lump with eyes.” Harvey’s work rarely strays far from whimsy, but she manages to channel her playfulness for complex and even wrenching effects: “I had been a finch filled/ with certainty until the end of the talk/ about the universe at which point I was just/ a diminutive coo lost in the bamboo, an or/ in a grove I thought was mine. Matthea Harvey is the author of three books of poetry-Modern Life, Sad Little Breathing Machine and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, and one childrens book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake. Readers familiar with Harvey’s work will find a continuation of her project here, but buffered and made even more pleasurable by its visual elements.

Brilliant strings of weird imagery and narrative yield unlikely resonances and stir fresh emotions in the reader, and are reinforced by the poems’ intellectual cores. Harvey ( Modern Life) delivers an ambitious and inventive new collection that straddles the line between poetry and art book. Graywolf, 14 (79pp) ISBN 978-1-55597-396-4 Taut and up-to-the-minute in its intellectual and its formal concerns, Harvey's sophomore effort seems sure to consolidate her.

Modern life matthea harvey