Blessings for the Hands

FromThe Sky Inside the Shaking Tree What you feel reveals you. Watch for the sustenance inclined to a source, enamored of singularity, quickly here and quickly gone, shadow from which the body's courage comes. Fireflies apparently stumbling. I slapped one on my leg. Its blood glowed. Blessings for the Handsfollows various speakersoften disabled speakers, who never once figure themselves as objects of complaint or self-pitythrough the haunted dreamscape of "normalcy." Indeed, dreams are continuous presences in this unusually subtle and elegant debut collection that juxtaposes physical circumstances with the vast interior life of the imagination. The subjects ofBlessings for the Handsare real and imagined confrontationsand reconciliationsbetween family members, friends, strangers, and animals. Matthew Schwartz's quasi-autobiographical verse complicates and clarifies the emotions waiting just underneath the patterns and expectations of the speakers' daylight lives, where anger, joy, corporeality, and mortality all seem to collide. For Schwartz, poetry is a sleight of hand that keeps the reader guessing through nearly imperceptible shifts between present vision and absent reality.Blessings for the Handsis a lyric reckoning of the tension between the life we are given and the life we are determined to lead. "Blessings for the Handsis emotionally strong and imaginatively wild, distinctive, deeply moving, without an ort of self-pity, and pervaded by 'compassion down to your fingertips' (which Chekhov said is 'the only method' both to write and to live). This angle of vision is sharp enough to unify much disparate material. The poems are clear and musical and consequently a pleasure to read and reread despite their gravity. I think this may be lasting work."Michael Ryan

Matthew Schwartz is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the International Institute of Modern Letters.