Her sequences “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” create a dystopian world whose main characters describe, somewhat-matter-of-factly, the brutality of an apocalyptic, post-disaster future which ends in the isolation of each sequence’s narrator.
Also different is the amount of “speculative” poetry-poetry that is not merely surreal, but incorporates the conventions and subject matter of fantasy and science fiction. Another notable shift is in the balance between prose and poetry whereas the majority of pieces in Sad Little Breathing Machine are lineated (and sometimes in two columns), prose poems predominate in Modern Life. Aside from its title, which appears to break from its whimsical predecessors, Modern Life differs from these earlier works in several other significant ways, most noticeably the nature of their humor: although Harvey still can’t resist a pun, the poems’ jokes are more self-conscious, as befits a book whose subject is ultimately the current political landscape and its violence-or, perhaps more accurately, the cultural violence that engenders the political. Like the cover photo, Harvey’s surprising, intelligent, and mysterious poetry spurns the personal and turns often to the pun, to the non sequitur, and to mathematical double-meanings. It’s an image that simultaneously evokes duality, the numerical, and life’s fragility so much depends on the dominoes remaining upright. Yet perhaps all of that tense conflict between the mechanical and human, as well as the blurred distinction between them, is still present in the phrase “Modern Life.” The book’s cover art, created by Harvey herself, seems to support this reading it features digitally-altered photographs of dominoes lined up and ready to fall, their dots oddly made to look like blackberries or clusters of eggs-something life-like, at any rate, but also mathematical: division and fractions suggested by the heavy black line that separates the dominoes’ two halves. Both earlier titles delight through their use of antithesis, overt and covert both ask us to sympathize with objects, to consider their point of view both seek to disrupt the division between human and nonhuman, and between the humorous and the pathetic. Given the imaginative titles of Matthea Harvey’s two previous collections of poetry, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form and Sad Little Breathing Machine, her new book’s title, Modern Life, seems to signal a dry urgency.
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