Overview

A contemplation on loss, grief, and persistence, this poetry collection moves back and forth in time, from childhood to old age, innocence to experience, constantly revisiting the pivot points upon which lives turn.

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9781599542294

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Reviews

Matthew M. Cariello's latest collection, Colloquy on Mad Tom, took me on a journey with the Buddha, with Vincent Van Gogh, with Pablo Neruda and Ko Un. Traveling from New Jersey, to Ohio, to Vermont, where Mad Tom ""names a brook, road, mountain, notch, and orchard,"" I realized that each gorgeous poem ""is another moment of regret / for not having finished the last one . . ."" Colloquy on Mad Tom is both a koan and conversation with animals, artists, rivers, roads, and trees. It is a necessary reminder of the sacredness of words.Jennifer Martelli, The Queen of Queens, winner of the IASA Book AwardTragedy offers nothing so much as a call to reintegrate the landscape of reality. Writing in the decades-long shadow of profound loss, Matthew Cariello searches, in Colloquy on Mad Tom, for ""the desperate distillation of being alive."" On this quest, he surveys a country of love, death, and memory, recording the notches gouged into its cliffs and following the rivers meandering in the depths of its chasms. These poems glow with the full chiaroscuro of experience. Jennifer Hambrick, a silence or two, In the High Weeds, and JoyrideIn Colloquy on Mad Tom, Cariello makes a bargain with his reader: ""Don't ask me how I know"" he says in ""The Cowbird,"" ""I've seen things"" and he takes us there with precision and grace. Buddha appears in a garden, a kestrel enters our sleep, a small boy wonders at the unpredictability of a New Jersey schoolyard. In each piece of poetry and prose we are confronted by the lyric depths of his imagination and longing to understand a world in which the beauty of a lilac blooming or the wonder of fast waters of a river in Vermont can persist amidst so much loss.Julia Lisella, Our Lively Kingdom

Author Information

MATTHEW CARIELLO is the author of four poetry collections: two of the poetry collections, A Boat That Can Carry Two (2011) and Talk (2019) were published by Bordighera Press. The Empty Field was published in 2022 by Red Moon Press; Self Portrait in the Dark was published in 2025 by Finishing Line Press. He is a senior lecturer in the English department at The Ohio State University in Columbus.

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