Black Aperture: Poems

This collection of poems centers around the subject of the suicide of the brother of the poetic first person – I am assuming it is the poet’s personal voice but well done if in a persona. The poems work on their own level individually but build up as if a composer were layering instrument over instrument to make a coherent whole. The poems feel youthful, but not like juvenilia but fresh like the spring after a frigid winter.

Rasmussen uses the mundane things around us - parking lot, refrigerator, gun - and the powerful draw of nature to bring us into his artful reflections of his brother’s death from suicide. So many genius moments in his writing. It’s one to consume and then return to consume again. Like any great poetry, I expect it to read differently each time.

Black Aperture lives up to the hype it has garnered. Rasmussen explores his brother's tragic suicide in Faulkner-esque perspective shifts, moving closer and farther with his linguistic lens to the actual event, its aftermath and the moments preceding it. Honestly, Jane Hirshfeld best captures what Rasmussen is about on the back of this book: "the subject here is the suicide of a brother. What cannot be altered remains; yet by changing saying, seeing is also made wider, more openly porous. The liberations of tongue, word, and conception...restore the possibility-sense."With each poem, Rasmussen moves closer to acceptance and further from understanding. This discursive movement culminates in the penultimate poem, "Reverse Suicide" in which, taking a page out of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five, Rasmussen reverses the film of his brother's suicide; leaves "fall up" to the trees and we're back in a familial Eden. But courageously and perfectly, this reversal can't last. So the collection ends with the wonderful "A Horse Grazes In My Shadow," in which the speaker/Rasmussen prays for both the annihilation and purifying of his self: "I wish the god of this place/would put me in its mouth/until I dissolve, until/the field doesn't end/and I am broken down/like a rifle,/swabbed clean."Absolutely wonderful.

This is a themed book of poems in three distinct sections chronicling the effect of a brothers suicide on the authors life. It is written with an astonishing precision that is full of longing, beauty, laughter, sadness, and despair. The images and words choices are often brilliant, vivid, and unique.Section I begins very strongly. Surprisingly to me, the high quality of the poems began to taper off noticeably by the end of the section, a bit of a let down considering this is a 60 page poetry book. On the other hand, Section II, Elegy in X Parts, is so beautifully written it more than makes up for the momentary dip in quality, and the strong current of the work continues into Section III to finish out the aching beauty of this collection.Slight inconsistencies notwithstanding, Rasmussen is a prodigiously talented writer, and this is one of the finest and most moving collections of contemporary poetry I've read. Highly recommended!

When reading Matt Rasmussen's poetry collection, Black Aperture, it's important to remember that the word "aperture" means more than a hole. It's also a space that light passes through. Perhaps stemming from the imagined bullet holes in the body of Rasmussen's brother, a suicide, images of holes appear in many guises. But it's the places where the light pours through the space that elevates this collection above the merely good. The milk that pours through the brother's body in the midst of the refrigerator light. The flashlight in the mouth of the dead brother creates "a coin of light [that] hovers / like the miniature sun." The power of the poet's imagination becomes strongest when, in "Reverse Suicide," he tells the suicide story in reverse order, hence bringing the brother back to life and the bullet back into their father's gun.

What can you say? It’s just the saddest realest most surrealist depiction of loss I’ve read in a long time. It hurt to read. I mean that as a compliment.

As I read Matthew Rasmussen’s poems, I was cast into his painstakingly examined post-suicide abyss. He has written a deeply emotional and beautiful collection of poetry that is meaningful from start to finish. His poems are written with chilling clarity and detailed imagery. The arc of this book is gripping and impeccably delivered from start to finish. This is the best collection of poems I have read in very many years.

The writing and sensitivity of the poems are impeccable. A good look at the grieving process.The collection is meant as a piece dealing with losing a loved one to suicide.It has some pretty profound moments, like this one:"...A hole is nothing but what remains around it..."But after awhile the poems begin to feel like different versions of the same poem.I don't want to call it a lack of variety. I don't mind a recurring subject or topic throughout a collection, but I do expect each poem to have its own claim or thought on the subject or topic.Instead, at times, and often enough to lose two stars, the speaker seems stuck.And perhaps thats the most honest and poetic part of the collection--but I doubt it was deliberate.