Creative Writing's Dee Matthews Featured in 'The New York Times Magazine'
The Nov. 14 edition of The New York Times Magazine featured the poem From the Pocket of His Lip, by Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Dee Matthews.
Smoke rose under my father’s tongue. There, a strange man with an oboe sat on the ridge of his tooth, playing wide vibratos through nimbusfog. I asked why he was there, too.
Fine tuning the orchestra of lies.
I nodded. They play beautifully, don’t they?
Especially in your key. Hum for me.
The poem was selected by Reginald Dwayne Betts, a poet and lawyer who created Freedom Reads, an initiative to curate microlibraries and install them in prisons across the country. Read his comments about the piece on The New York Times Magazine website.
Matthews' first collection of poems, Simulacra, won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was published by Yale University Press. She is the recipient of a 2020 Pew Fellowship.