A Green Light

By Matthew Rohrer

• Description
• Reviews

• ***Also available as an audiobook***
  Finalist for the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize
  
  Matthew Rohrer’s simple, hilarious, generous, and strangely disquieting poems conjure versions of the most familiar aspects of our lives—friendship, marriage, childhood, work—into which intrude incongruous, peculiar, fantastical, yet somehow totally recognizable elements. Over and over these poems leave us convinced that we've learned something very important and mysterious, yet we can’t say exactly what.

• So, this is a book of mirrors. Some of these mirrors show us dark pools of humility, some make us think we are somewhere else. Some I think are full of lies and some are magic holes.
  Zachary Schomburg, Octopus Magazine
  
  Equal parts punk rock and pastoral, (Rohrer has) a voice that seems unearthly in its ability to be detached and simultaneously tender.
  American Poet
  
  In the midst of what could be, in other hands, wreckage or hopelessness, Rohrer’s poems run up the banner of hopefulness, create complete poems out of incomplete thoughts... This is a book with an edge, a book of brash clamour and hard-earned joy.
  Judges' Citation, the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize
  
  A Green Light is in fact Rohrer’s timeliest book to date, and it reminds us that a measure of irony can keep us from being duped by those in power, from falling prey to rhetoric: “The book that says the President is a friend of trees is a book of lies!... It is a book about how to have a big piece missing from your head and live.”
  Craig Morgan Teicher, Boston Review