Matthea Harvey's work had been published
in numerous literary journals and magazines, including
Ploughshares, The New Yorker, Grand Street, and The Paris
Review.
She received a BA in English from Harvard,
where she took workshops with such poets as Louise Glück
and Seamus Heaney.
After working as an assistant editor at Columbia University
Press, Harvey received her MFA from the Iowa Writers'
Workshop.
And she is currently development director
for Bomb Magazine in New York, and poetry editor for American
Letters & Commentary.
She's also a faculty member in a low-residency MFA
program at Warren Wilson.
Her first book of poems, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace
of the Human Form, was released in 2001
to great critical acclaim, and her second, Sad Little
Breathing Machine is forthcoming from Graywolf Press
in the spring of 2004.
The New Yorker has called Harvey's poems mournfully comic
and syntactically inventive, and Jorie Graham
claims, "It is her fine music which
manifests Harvey's seriousness right from one's
first encounter with her voice.
Later, it is the pairing of profound spiritual confinement
with a crisp, almost at times unleashed,
longing, which comes to gird the music's muscularity
and activity.
These are poems that race ahead at the speed of the mind,
which I might say, is certainly faster
than that of the reading eye.
The effect of her fervently compressed narratives
is that the reader is left in a delicious
tailspin of constant vigilance, wondering,
when did that image end?
When did this new thought begin?
Harvey's poems rise with abundance-- abundance of sea
life, and plant life, and abundance of soul
searching, and formal idiosyncrasy, and in the end,
she tells us what she's after, saying,
'I know now how to kneel, that's all.
I wasn't just another word coin.
I would have liked an answer.'
[APPLAUSE]