By Sebastian Mathews
Narrated By Sebastian Matthews
Length: 3 hrs and 29 mins
Release Date: 09-14-17
Print Pub: Red Hen Press
Summary
In Beginner's Guide to a Head-On Collision, Sebastian Matthews offers a glimpse into his painful yet transcendental journey of healing a broken body, mending a shattered soul, and the utter zeal of making a layup when you thought that would never again be possible. With honesty and wit, this poetic memoir demonstrates how, chipped piece after chipped piece, Matthews and his family put together their fractured lives after nearly losing them in a head-on collision.
Beginner's Guide to a Head-On Collision
Praise
"Beginner's Guide to a Head-On Collision offers the deeply moving poetic memoir of Sebastian Matthews's life in the years after the car accident that devastated him and his wife and son. The poems, which often read like electric improvised prayer-songs, intimately evoke the terrors and wonders of catastrophic physical injury and of 'life re-booted.' They are disturbing, eerie poems that embody the paradoxes of being The Dead Man at the crossing. They are amazingly honest in their hopeful, mystical sense of fate. In this unforgettable book, the reader is present at the scene of the accident where the hovering spirit that has departed the body addresses the living person re-entering his brokenness and answering for his transcendent awareness."--Kevin McIlvoy, author of The Complete History of New Mexico
"It cleaves the life. An auto accident. Moving it into before and after. Parts of this postcataclysm instruction manual read like a dream, as if what is happening is happening both to the self in toto--batted, fractured, spliced and reconstructed--as well as to another self that watches, cool and objective, determining the outcome. By reading Beginner's Guide to a Head-On Collision we learn how to go in and out of the body as necessary and, in order to take in the possibility of a larger life, how to wrest from breakage release from our thin views of who we are. Here is Matthews the husband, the father, the driver, the patient, the Virgo obsessively advising, the man looking back, the man looking forward."--Vievee Francis, author of Forest Primeval, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sebastian Matthews is the author of the poetry collection We Generous (Red Hen Press) and a memoir, In My Father's Footsteps (W. W. Norton). He co-edited, with Stanley Plumly, Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews(a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected William Matthews. Matthews teaches at Warren Wilson College and serves on the faculty of the Queens College Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program, as well as on the editorial board of Q Ave Press, makers of handmade poetry chapbooks. His work has appeared in journals such as the Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and Tin House.