Song of the Systole

Author: Matthew Gagnon

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil (2017)

"In ravishing language that blends ecstasis with visionary wonder, Matt Gagnon’s poems plumb the phenomenological terrain of our creaturely experience. “This terra parches wonderment / and leaves us still and ghosted,” Gagnon writes, and the work gathered here speaks to the serious introit of desire and ghostliness that limn our anthropomorphic selves. Forwarding Louis Zukofsky’s “upper limit music” and the prescient romanticism of Robert Duncan’s lyric address, Gagnon masterfully weaves together the scales and signs of our worldly attention, providing necessary evidence of the body’s “molecular advance twilit, sheened, abraded.” Querulous, ruminative, distilling narratives from the molecular tide of diurnal experience, Gagnon’s haunting Song of the Systole asks “Is it possible to love more than one world, to see clear across to the other side?” This beautiful book, “hounded by rituals of loss,” inscribes its pain-worn and joyous journey in an effort to make that crossing visible and audible to each of us." —Andrew Mossin