Curare
(C&R Press, 2022)
Lucian Mattison’s poetry collection, Curare, won the Silver Medal for the 2023 international Latino Book Awards, Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award. The collection is a work about remembering our humanity in the face of the destabilizing and dehumanizing forces of technology, climate change, and capitalism. The image-rich poems delight in the odd and off-kilter while walking an informal lyrical path through landscapes of the speculative, quotidian, urban, naturalistic, folkloric, and dream-like. At their core, the poems acknowledge the tragedy of humanity’s self-made tools of destruction and, at once, ask us to hope that these same tools can become remedies—the arrow poison transformed into healing salve when picked apart and dosed.
Silver Medal, 2023 International Latino Book Awards
Cover Art: Blair Nakamoto
Paperback, 88 pages
Advance Praise
“In his most recent collection Curare, Lucian Mattison delivers the goods as expected: poems soaked in the rich oil of existence and bursting with the throb of many worlds; and a voice that leads readers through characteristic turns of thoughtfulness layered beneath tightly focused moments. But these poems are perhaps even more deeply tinged with the ethos of our time…”
— Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (2020), and 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia
“It is hard to resist being drawn into the crucible of his sharp juxtapositions, which bring us back to attention the way slamming on the brakes snaps us out of the daily stupor of traffic. Given where we are, wandering the aftermath of a deadly pandemic and watching the horrors of a war just begun, these are the poems that we need—pressing us to ask ‘What have we won / that doesn’t hurt/ us?’”
— Tim Seibles, author of Fast Animal, 2012 National Book Award Finalist