Black Aperture: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: May 13, 2013
Number of pages: 72
ISBN-13: 9780807150887
Description: In his moving debut collection, Matt Rasmussen faces the tragedy of his brother's suicide, refusing to focus on the expected pathos, blurring the edge between grief and humor. In "Outgoing," the speaker erases his brother's answering machine message to save his family from "the shame of dead you / answering calls." In other poems, once-ordinary objects become dreamlike. A buried light bulb blooms downward, "a flower / of smoldering filaments." A refrigerator holds an evening landscape, "a tinfoil lake," "vegetables / dying in the crisper."