Terrarium

Shortlisted, Trillium Book Award for Poetry Raw, confessional, and often messy, Terrarium continues Matthew Walsh’s exploration of Queer identity and desire against the lonely highs and lows of depression and addiction. In this new collection, Walsh begins where their debut collection, These are not the potatoes of my youth, left off. Writing in their trademark conversational style, Walsh wanders from Toronto parkettes “with remnants of magnolia leaves” to California, “a long/black cocktail dress the night lights/amethyst and citrine against the arm/muscle of the sea,” their voice intimate and exposed, a whisper between friends or lovers. And then, when they ruminate on influences and themes as diverse as the poetry of Frank O’Hara and Gwendolyn MacEwen, the vagaries of Instagram, and the reimagination of Miss Havisham in a Toronto bathhouse, they offer readers the opportunity to think deeply or laugh loudly, reaching out to close the gap between us.

About the Author :
Matthew Walsh grew up in Nova Scotia and now lives in Toronto. Their poems have appeared in Joyland, the Capra Review, the Antigonish Review, the Malahat Review, and Geist; in a chapbook entitled ICQ; and in their celebrated book-length collection These are not the potatoes of my youth, a finalist for the Trillium and Gerald Lampert Awards.

Review :
I’ll never fully understand how Matthew Walsh manages to document life so cleanly. What I do understand is my need to read and reread all of it — the dreams, the waking life stories, the persistent doubts, the powerful desires. Toronto poet Matthew Walsh’s second collection is a fragile negotiation with the confusion and worry of how to be fully human in our modern world. I want to grab a coffee with the speaker of Terrarium. I want to walk around with them and listen to all the funny deep things they have to say about art and what they did last night and the bizarre things that live on the internet. I want to go off on a tangent with the speaker of Terrarium and never come back and end up in some bar, at last call, drinking whatever a curdled birthday cake shot is. This book brought to mind the line by Wallace Stevens, “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” This is a strange book, brilliant and true. In Terrarium, Matthew Walsh builds a world teeming with donkey statues, deer skeletons, and howling dogs, gentle and unsettling observations of daily life, and the wry wisdom of a tender, visionary voice. These brilliant and devastating poems of intimacy and estrangement are a masterclass in understatement and the subtle music of the poetic line. What a joy to peer inside Walsh’s “wet mysterious brain” and live awhile in the compulsive, whirling universe of these poems. What’s really beautiful about Terrarium is its confessional tone, its pure and unabashed honesty. The speaker tells the truth as they see it, and the observations become well-crafted images and metaphors. Matthew Walsh guides the reader into a city full of stories with sex, graffiti, hurt, and the kind of humour that is both sprung from survival and makes you want to sit next to it at a party. Terrarium is a city-infused loneliness that is rooted in satire and surrealism. This book is so deeply queer that it should have its own brand. Terrarium is an exceptional collection of confessional poems. Each poem is a story that is so raw, powerful, and very emotional. I had chills reading these poems. This is one of my favourite poetry books ever. Matthew Walsh’s Terrarium leaves me aching, inspired, in awe. To quote the poet themself, I am amazed at Walsh’s power — “how much I have had to keep straight.” This power manifests in Walsh’s crafting of patient, artful meaning from the alienating flux of twenty-first century life and in their efforts to confront, resist, and counter the destructive limitations of straightness as a dominant cultural force. In performing this urgent, necessary work, Terrarium is as tender and attentive as it is transformative and profound. “After reading Terrarium by Matthew Walsh I’m filled with an urgency to say: This is the kind of poetry we need more of.”