Reviews of Goodnight Architecture
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“Gretchen Mattox’s Goodnight Architecture is a fine example of a collection that houses mind and heart harmoniously. She has read her Louise Glück and learned from her without being derivative in the least: ‘it must have tasted like grief, the narrative flame. Nothing fit again, a miscalculation of weather.’ Small words (‘again’) carry so much weight in these poems, working to add texture and emotional complexity. So important—the difference between ‘Nothing fit’ and ‘Nothing fit again’ and Mattox knows this difference, feels it, lives it . . . In the title poem, just about smack in the middle, the spirit of the book resides: ‘Whatever I needed to know, I have gone on without.’ Poem to poem, Mattox is tough and minces no words. She doesn’t paint bleakness for the sake of drama; indeed, there is ample demonstration of grit and perseverance, and yes, empowerment, throughout. No beaten dog here. Despair, yes. Regret, yes. Blame, often. But there is also the speaker who can say, ‘What I took to be of grave concern hardly mattered. I was steering the boat of my concern beyond a certain agitation.’ A wonderful debut.”

—Martha Rhodes

“In a gallery of exquisitely rendered landscapes ‘made luminous by grief,’ Gretchen Mattox detonates the family romance to remind us how home can be both schoolhouse and ground zero. The book’s arc is from first shattering to maturity, the poems diligently, fearlessly rooted in the poet’s flight from the imposing cemetery of the past (‘the long neck of childhood is shadow upon shadow’) toward a redeeming, hard-won present. I love Gretchen Mattox’s sexual and emotional candor, and the distinctive way she weds her directness to vivid language and consistently inventive, imagistic beauty. ‘Lettered in ropes and shadows,’ Goodnight Architecture is a candid, agile, and beautiful debut.”

—Cyrus Cassells

"The poems in Gretchen Mattox's debut collection are thoroughly informed by the final line of the first poem: 'Here, console yourself, look back and tell.' Like Joan Didion's famous remark that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, Gretchen Mattox tells herself stories in order to live with what has happened. Clearly influenced by the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Mattox rests on the wobbly margin between autobiography and myth, locating her poems in the wilderness of the self-remembered and self-invented. 'O mythical father / I have been on my own too long,' she writes, testifying to the almost-spiritual loneliness of this book. Departed fathers, departed mothers, departed husbands and boyfriends are all recurring figures here - when Mattox writes, 'Whatever I touch turns to grief,' she seems to comment not only on her life, but on her work. The book is punctuated by a series of elegies, whose elegant language and lyrical voice transform the burdens of loss into the beauty of art.
 
One of Mattox's most acute poetic gifts lies in her skill for figurative language: rotating dryers are compared to mandalas, a litter of opened telephone books on the freeway to a flock of birds, twilight is 'as sensual as an exposed thigh.' Mattox has learned from Plath not only the gift of transforming the personal into the poetic, but also the ability to render
the ordinary into the ecstatic. . ."

—Slope