Ordinary Sun

Ordinary Sun

Henriksen opens Ordinary Sun by insisting that “an eye is not enough.” Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty—rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels… Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate. Henriksen's debut is one of the most striking collections from a small press this year. Just look at some of these lines: "Her axe made flowers open," "What I cannot find in the morning is most myself," "Those were the screams/ of our happiness you mistook." Like Frank Stanford before him, Henriksen's project is one of building a mythology around the self in which the walls that separate speaker and poet break down. As seen in the lines above, Henriksen forges an individual poetics using a voice that seeks to define the world around it with highly lyrical, demanding--and rewarding--language. "Far from the field/ the sung sang out," he writes, "a bucket of tallow/ yellow pallor--/ light aging in a glass." The pacing of these poems, the tautness with which they are rhythmically and rhetorically wound, is often such that a line will resolve or reveal itself just in time for Henriksen to depart from it in another, no less arresting, direction. Nowhere is this more realized than in the book's seventh, and best, sequence, "The New Surrealism," when Henriksen leaves us with perhaps his most beautiful and halting lines: "and God continues snoring/ in the wound round us and will until when to be is as was." --Publishers Weekly Matthew Henriksen was born in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1977. He is the author of two books of poetry from Black Ocean, The Absence of Knowing (2015) and Ordinary Sun (2011). His poems have been anthologized recently in Hick Poetics and The Volta Book of Poets. A co-editor of the online poetry journal Typo, he also edited Another Part of the Flood: Poems, Stories, and Correspondence of Frank Stanford, which appeared in Fulcrum #7. A bookseller and adjunct instructor, he currently lives in the Arkansas Ozarks, where he assists the Northwest Arkansas Prison Stories Project and coaches under-6 girls soccer.