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Adrian Matejka is the author of three collections of poetry-The Devil's Garden(2002),Mixology(2009), which was a winner of the National Poetry Series competition, andThe Big Smoke(2013), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Matejka is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and United States Artists. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and daughter.
In this seismic and sonic new Matejka collection Richard Pryor is an Indiana sun god and a Black boy waits impatiently for the solar system to alight inside his mailbox. Rich and ekphrastic, this journey of boy-to-man ascendance cradles the might and memoir of motherships and other two-legged planets that lift our chins to starlight then break us in two. <b>--Nikky Finney</b> Fueled by powdered milk, boom box tracks and <i>Star Trek</i> reruns, <i>A Map to the Stars</i> charts a poetic <i>bildungsroman</i> as well as a redemptive journey through music searching for 'a little city of gleaming/ gallantry.' These are mouth-watering poems full of 'tough-guy shufflebucks' and motherships 'gorgeous as comets, ' a 'vernacular hubbub' that hurtles through our 'violently Technicolor heliosphere'--and beyond. For a rocket-powered poet like Adrian Matejka, where else to aim but the stars? <b>--Campbell McGrath Matejka's fourth book is a coming-of-age collage set in Reagan-era Indianapolis, a series of intimate verbal snapshots of African American youth and family life. The speaker of these poems is caught between lonesome artifacts of the past . . . and hopeful, strange, and complicated glimpses of possible futures . . . Matejka swirls these seemingly disparate parts into a stunningly coherent vision of life in the 1980s, growing up poor and black and full of energy and longing. <b>- Craig Morgan Teicher, npr.org
