Bio

“Matthew Minicucci’s Dual questions the nature of signification  and the fibers of linguistic-relational reality. He ponders, in form, content, in language acquisition’s exposed processes of how place and time bend into vivid collage, which morphs into its own complexity and nuance—the world of ancient mythology bending into personal history and into magic. Multiple crossings in single poems with various, pick-your-own avatars excite the possibilities of a reader’s expectation. No matter how much I explore in these pages, there remain countless countries yet to be seen. The texture of the language, the clarity of image, the sonic play causes me to ask, if there is text and non-text, how are these poems haunting me in all possible universes?”

-Rajiv Mohabir, author of CUTLISH

“How tenderly, how avidly, Matthew Minicucci twins for us life and death  in this epic-inspired collection. With linguistic and literary resources that leave me breathless, Minicucci has created, in extraordinary poems of counterpoint, elegy, and autobiography, a dualism (a mirroring, a conjunction, a metronomic pairing) not binary so much as inclusively generative and devastating. I will be recommending this brilliant and inventive book for a very long time.”

-Kathy Fagan, Author of Bad Hobby 

Winner of the 2019 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award

"Small Gods by Matthew Minicucci is one of the most beautiful, moving, and intelligent books of poetry I've read in I don't know how long. These poems and prose poems draw from sources as heterogeneous as the Pauline letters, the natural sciences, mathematics and astronomy in order to explore, inhabit, celebrate and mourn the mutability of love,  the vulnerabilities of attachment and the unlikely, random and evanescent nature of existence itself. The depth and variety of metaphor mirrors the depth and variety of this poet's remarkable curiosity and  openness to the world, in all its glory and horror. The poems stick to memory like burrs to a pant leg."

-Alan Shapiro, author of Night of the Republic

"What if, all this time, you were already home. What would you be willing to burn to light it?" Indeed the poems we encounter in Matthew Minicucci's Small Gods are a conflagration: visionary and other-worldly in their wisdom and scope. Small Gods is a big book—big on intellect, imagination, vulnerability, and unabashed beauty. Enter it knowing you will leave changed."

-Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

"Small Gods reads like a sacred text with a tambourine keeping beat behind each verse. Matthew Minicucci manages to conjure not only the collective spirit but also the collective yearning that we may not give permission to express in our day-to-day lives. Whether rendering the quotidian or the biblical—and both appear, seamlessly—these poems  ask all the right questions, which are really the answers to our  concerns: "What if silence was the smallest unit of measure for distance  between two people. An imaginary number." Or, what if, for instance, "The fear that light might only be within; or lost beneath a candle's douter," could be spoken? Minicucci allows the exploration—and the dread and the hope and the longing—to come to the surface of our lives and he invites us to join in. Amen!"

A. Van Jordan, author of M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A

"Matthew Minicucci’s new book is a balm for our time. In a quiet voice, he counsels, “Wait, and watch…” Devoid of rhetoric, easy outrage, and exhortation, Minicucci advocates, instead, for the transformative power of close-up scrutiny – poetry’s timeless way of looking that encourages  the nuanced narratives of “small gods” living in the margins and crevices of everyday life to rise into view. This is a book of rare intelligence, deep wisdom, and exquisite linguistic beauty. Small Gods enriches us with its moral courage and its compassionate faith in the ultimate value of our fraught humanity."

-Kate Daniels, author of Four Testimonies 

Winner of the 2014 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

"What are we to do with anger? What are we to do with love? What are we to do with one another, given all that happens and has happened between us? These are a few of the questions that haunt Matthew Minicucci's deeply original and profoundly moving poems. In work personal and  learned, steeped in familial life, the natural world, and the culture's storehouse of literature, myth, and history, Minicucci transforms outward knowledge and observation into accurate and deftly navigable  vessels of inner life. Whales' hearts and family stories; etymologies,  metrics, and syntax; the war machines and fishing lures of past and present worlds—all are harnessed together, hammered together, in this book-long exploration of our shared and particular human fates."

Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty

"Matthew Minicucci begins this collection with his prize-winning poem, "A Whale's Heart," where in the old world, a rose petal tincture was used to minimize a scar, but never concealed it completely. This is a book of such faint scars, losses almost imperceptible but there, hidden under the hardline, or just above the heart. It is how these losses are transformed, through the alchemy of memory, forgiveness and love, small, intense, painterly studies of a country populated by the human family."

Dorriane Laux, author of Facts About the Moon

"If fate is, as Aurelius contends, a weaver, Matthew Minicucci's remarkable collection Translation stunningly unravels all we have been given: the fate of each species, the fate of each family, the fate of languages, and the fate of the ancient texts which constitute the violent, compelling sea on which so much of our understanding of the present floats and into whose complex  amnion we never tire of descending. Translation not only explores what we might call the work and origins of literal translation, but it is itself a beautiful, unflinching, unfolding embodiment of our most essential human translational efforts: the work of translating experience into words, memory into understanding, and anger into forgiveness. Here is a rare collection that must be held in full, a book  that deepens its inquiries with the turn of every page. if the metaphor is itself a kind of translation, then Minicucci demonstrates with both imagistic precision and an abiding associative mystery how all things—both the fist and the clasp, the sword and the shield, the hawk and the turtle, and, finally, the lilac bush and the switch fashioned from it—when carefully lifted and turned, implicate us all."

Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City