National Poetry Month, Day 18: Matthea Harvey

by Susie Meserve | Apr 18, 2014 | Great Reads

I wanted to post something from the book Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (great title, eh?), Matthea Harvey’s 2000 book published by Alice James books. I decided on this excerpt from “Ceiling Unlimited Series” because I read it obsessively when I was writing the poems in my chapbook, Faith, and I’m not ashamed to say that I borrowed a certain je ne sais quoi from Matthea Harvey when I was writing. I loved the kind of fairy tale quality of these…and the rhythm, and the way they make very little sense at all but leave you with these wildly clear images. If it’s possible to borrow all of that, I tried.

Here’s a link to an excerpt from “Ceiling Unlimited Series.”?

You can learn more about Matthea Harvey here.

Funny thing: I think the title of this book inspired me, at the time, to take a lot of baths. Because, pulling my copy off the shelf, I noticed that the pages are kind of fat and wrinkled, like they’d gotten wet too many times!