Somebody Else Sold the World

June 21, 2021
Matejka (Map to the Stars) delivers a cathartic ode to a tumultuous year of disease and unrest in his thoughtful latest. Vignettes of looming disease and nature’s indifference to human suffering are rendered in their full complexity, “the possibly contaminated// air moves like the cognate/ of a person: it has walking// shoes as scuffed as a music/ conductor’s. Its hands, needy// as a politician’s. The whole/ neighborhood pops with// unknowing while optimistic/ birds chirp & skip & chirp.” Matejka masterfully combines grief and hope, and one of his most salient insights is the pervasive end of ignorance and subsequent vulnerability in American life: “every/ thing sang its entropy. Almost/ everybody grew eventually. Not by/ revolution but realization: nostalgia made mnemonic.” Though humor is not his priority, he utilizes it well when he chooses to, as in “Coincidence/Accident”: “& now everybody is some kind/ of delicious fetish. A whole/ chorus of proclivities, full-throttled/ in the washbowl of next-door/ freaky.” With an epigraph that draws from David Bowie (“You’re face to face/ with the man who sold the world”), music serves as an impetus for these accomplished pages that subtly convey the whiplash of everyday life.