"Projection"
by Alexandra Mattraw
cover photograph by Anna Hallin

**

...Mattraw's prose renders the sublime deftly, creating a deceptively simple balance between the tourist gaze and the poet's imagination. In her world, such projections are as significant as the numerous everyday objects we encounter throughout the chapbook--objects that cease to be everyday when apprehended through Mattraw's elliptical and defamiliarizing prose. We take on specifics, but are never weighed down by them. Instead, Projection encourages us to locate ourselves within a world of endless questions and sheer emotionality, where the power of intimacy is matched by the raw and abundant strength of the Arctic landscape.

**

$7 (includes shipping)

**

Projection

How we love what’s hidden, as when Mary gave us birth from her white
robed folds but removed all visible scars of broken skin. Curiosity is a an
industry we follow : to make life sacred by removing all we can know. And
we leave, instead, a balcony of shadows leaned-up against a white screen, or
spilled as black paint on canvas, while in the sunlight, the nipples of cherry
blossoms, tapped lightly by cool March wind.

**

"Alexandra Mattraw's poems seduce a reader in many ways: with the clarity and beauty of their language, with deft poetic skills, with exotic subject matter, and, most important of all for me, with a penetrating poetic intelligence. In Mattraw’s chapbook, Projection, the poems interact with the reader and with each other, slowly and subtly altering the reader’s perception of the world. The rhythms and the language change to offer us shifting landscape, dream and hallucination and "reality" combined in an intoxicating mixture. Any new work by Alexandra Mattraw is a must read, original and unpredictable and full of dazzling excitements."

-Edward Smallfield, Apogee Press

"Projection" has no page numbers. Mattraw's gaze sees beyond the distracting details to the thing itself and, in her assured poems, writes toward an undivided wholeness seldom seen in contemporary poetry. The title poem begins, 'How we love what’s hidden' and these poems are one singular litany illuminating and momentarily lifting the 'weight of a darkness we invented.'"

-Kevin Simmonds, poet, musician and filmmaker; author of Mad for Meat

**

Alexandra Mattraw is a third generation Northern Californian. She shared a residency with artists at the Vermont Studio Center in 2009 with whom she was featured in The New, Weird America art show in 2010. Her lineated poems can be found in VOLT, Cultural Society, and Switchback. She holds an MA in Humanities from University of Chicago and an MFA in poetry from the University of San Francisco.