Reviews of Subject to Change
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A Brenda Hillman Selection

“Matthew Thorburn’s Subject to Change gives us a poetry of the meta-empirical, asking, ‘It’s not too late, is it?’ Exuberant and crystalline, these poems articulate the problematic beauty of our grand mix-up, our new and comic Dark Ages. The next time a student asks me, ‘What’s after Postmodernism?’ I’ll tell her, ‘Read this.’”

—Angela Ball

“In Subject to Change, Matthew Thorburn’s got the Duchamp sunglasses dusted off and the Gertrude Stein boots all shined up, the Art Blakey bottom with the Sweets Edison top, the long afternoons and avenues of New York and Detroit drawn invoking and endless in front of you, a Lee Baby Sims soundtrack crackling on the radio: it’s a sad and beautiful world.
       “In poems such as ‘What to Say, An Aria,’ lists of questions are assembled like lies or wishes. Should we mention how, in the midst of acknowledging the heartbreak, salvation scurries off in an Italian dress? While seeing the escape means we’ve missed it, the echoes of desire flapping its wings over us are euphoric. Lift your head and listen to it return in ‘Italian Coffee.’
       “When you wake days later, you’ll remember: Christy to Kristen, the Variations, the Triptych, the sparse style of the past century, the movement of the moon from Sappho to Li Po, the page that stays sad as long as you look at it, the
glow of the moment trailing off like an oboe . . .”

—m loncar

"The examination of personal nostalgia resonates throughout Matthew Thorburn's Subject to Change, and this underlying thread of sadness and remorse and hopeful expectation—a quest for what might have been and might yet be—makes the emotional edge of these poems burn with brilliant clarity."

—Matthew W. Schmeer, Verse Magazine

“And now comes Subject to Change, his first collection of poems. It is a lush, extravagant book, one that resists any easy categories. It is filled with the energy of urgent composition (this poet really believes he should engage the themes of the ages), with genuine humor, and with formal confidence.”

—Keith Taylor, Ann Arbor Observer

"Wallace Stevens once said that poets must love words with all their power to love anything at all.  Few first books show as much pleasure in words as Matthew Thorburn’s Subject to Change 'Have you ever seen a less flight-worthy lark, / such an archipelago of glum-faced rice-throwers?' Thorburn writes of a winter wedding. Influenced by Paul Muldoon, among others, Thorburn fashions original devices to depict familiar affections.  In a sestina, he celebrates a more fortunate marriage, showing its couple 'happy as two blue / plate specials in a diner called Moe’s."

—Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review (November 21, 2004)

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