BOOKS
The Life & Times of American Crow
It’s the early 90s: before the advent of the internet, before cell phones magically appear in everyone’s hands. The Gulf War has begun. To Linus Grey and his circle of bohemian friends, this just might be the last, great gasp of “beat” culture. But what to do? Where to go? When Sara heads out for San Francisco, Linus picks up from the seacoast town of Portsmouth, NH, and sets out after her.
Travelogue: A Photographic Journey
Born out of the pandemic, Travelogue: A Photographic Journey—a collaboration between writer and photographer, father and son—features nearly 80 of Charter Weeks’ amazing photographs alongside my “takes” on them. Along the way, I interviewed Charter on his work, his approach to photography, and on his life as a traveler, street photographer, and filmmaker.
A Head-On Collision and Its Aftermath
Beyond Repair: Living in a Fractured State
Beyond Repair is a portrait of community in traumatized times…With wryly insightful observations, [it] brings us closer with every sentence to the deep repairing we need. ~ Beth Ann Fennelly
The Beginner’s Guide to a Head-On Collision
Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision offers the deeply moving poetic memoir of Sebastian Matthews’ life in the years after the car accident that devasted him and his wife and son. ~ Kevin McIlvoy
Earlier Books
Miracle Day
Poems
Sebastian Matthews’ poetry has an enviable and light-hearted spontaneity. He has a voice and an eye that act like Velcro, picking up all the sights and sounds around him. ~ Jennifer Grotz
We Generous
Poems
Sebastian Matthews writes a poetry that is wonderfully, and unfashionably, human. In poems that explore love, nature, jazz, and the experiences of a white man in black culture, Matthews ventures boldly and open-heartedly into the world. ~ Dana Levin
In My Father’s Footsteps
A Memoir
At the center of his personal labyrinth, Sebastian Matthews found his own father, a brilliant man, one of the finest American poets of his generation, who was meticulously careful in what he showed his son—and the world—about himself. ~ Charles Baxter
Works by William Matthews
Co-Edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly
New Hope for The Dead
New Hope for the Dead features the best of Matthews' remaining uncollected work, including over 30 poems spanning Matthews' prolific but tragically cut-short career.
Search Party
With Search Party, his son Sebastian and his friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly have brought together a collection drawing from all of William Matthews’ previous published work. Here are meditations on relationships, work, family life, and, of course, jazz.
The Poetry Blues
Throughout, Matthews writes about his love of music, language, poetry, and art while illuminating the subtle and important ways in which the things about which he feels passionately help to define and shape him.