Modern Life - by Matthea Harvey (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Matthea Harvey's Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future," Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world. Her prose pieces and lyrics examine the divided, halved self in poems about centaurs, ship figureheads, and a robot boy. Throughout, Harvey's signature wit and concision show us the double-sided nature of reality, of what we see and what we know.

Review Quotes

"Matthea Harvey's vision of America is spooky, apocalyptic, and beautiful: proof that there is wonder in even a dark time like ours." --George Saunders

"Harvey is a master of the surprising, illuminating connection --the cognitive jump-cut . . . There is something of the Martian about Harvey . . . her disjunctions, reversals and bizarreries arise from her inquiry into the strangeness of sentience itself--how odd it is to think, feel and look." --Chicago Tribune on Sad Little Breathing Machine

About the Author

Matthea Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form. She is a contributing editor at jubilat and Bomb, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Brooklyn.