A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno

A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno carries within it all the technique, vision, imaginative labour, and razor-sharp precision of Matt Rader’s first two collections, Living Things and Miraculous Hours. But it also ascends to a new and luminous, demanding, particularized realm of the human.

Wildflowers and weeds, newspaper archives and illness, hostels and hostiles, parenting and the shadowy history of grandparents, war and Renaissance paintings: Matt Rader’s unassuming, deeply spirited, and expansive poems show us again how contemporary lyric can go such a long way toward revealing our true homes to us at the moment we find ourselves most nakedly un-housed. Rader seeks out limits, borders, and frontiers -- those mapped for us by authority, and the concomitant, interior shadowlines we ourselves draw -- in order to test their validity.

If Borges had imagined an atlas of our layered identities, it might look like these poems. This is an astounding collection from a thrilling voice in poetry.