Kaleidoscopes

Matt Hetherington’s sixth collection is a palindromic homage to the personal, the political, and the personal as political. Filled with playful, sometimes cheeky poetry, Kaleidoscopes is also a book of relationships and gratitude, of things missing and abundant, and of a poet seeking to find his place in a difficult but ultimately joyful world. Matt Hetherington demonstrates different means of moving big weights with gentle movements, and tends to conceptual boundary fences by leaving small gaps for the reader to pass through from either direction. Sitting at his ‘sturdy old table of fine dark wood’, sometimes he sees himself, sometimes others, and he extracts an earthy perfume through meditated irony, and through years of shaping and dissecting the quiet, elastic jazz in his subconscious vernacular. He has taught himself how to replace the tripwire in his own open-ended riddle. —Nathan Shepherdson