Rise Up

By Matthew Rohrer

• Description
• Reviews

• Rohrer turns wide eyes and lyric wit toward the requirements of fatherhood, citizenship, and romantic love.
  
  Approaching pleasure and terror with the same searching and determined curiosity, Rise Up traverses political, natural, and domestic landscapes with gentle agility. Beautifully crafted surfaces give way to sincere depth.

• Hip, humorous, ironic, winking and deceptively footloose, the 17 stylish poems and sequences of Rohrer’s fifth collection take a skewed look at the politics and passages of contemporary life. 
  Publishers Weekly
  
  The poems in Rise Up are serious and well-crafted, but also funny and fresh, exhibiting a playfulness he’s shown in previous collections. Rohrer proves himself a master of Stanley Kunitz’s advice to end on an image and not explain it, letting the image explain itself. Again and again, he ends on images simultaneously cryptic and perfectly fitting, like a poetry gymnast sticking landing after landing.
  Kathleen Rooney, Open Letters
  
  Matthew Rohrer’s fourth solo book, is a gathering of poems presented in a nonchalant, softly comic voice. The speaker often seems to be an acutely observing bystander—“police / throughout the city wearing / new pants, with cargo pockets / because of the increased threat / it was important to stress.” The stance of the poems is more surreal than emotional, but Mr. Rohrer embraces his environment with lovely imagery. “Bring blue milk home from / the corner where they / bottle the day.” And his desire to be kind rises often, as when he writes, “Ellen / I say slowly, I’m sure you will succeed / in your endeavors. Those are / not the words I planned to say. / I was still awakening from a dream of the distant war.”
  Open Books: A Poem Emporium, The Goods
  
  The poet is ever trying to shove away that darkness, or at least to ride it out in the corner bagel place until the black clouds pass. As a document of love in the time of colic, Rise Up succeeds wholeheartedly. The surrealistic flourishes of the past are not missed, or are honed to absolute sharpness (“the room is gently lit by the green / shirt you gave me,” from “Poem”). There’s a wealth of real feeling here buttressed by a strong sense that the poems really matter to the poet. He should never have to apologize for any of it.
  David Sewell, Coldfront Magazine