Redefining the Methods of Building Meaning: The Poetry/Prose of Matthew Mahaney

This week I got to sit down with 3/4 of Matthew Mahaney’s works: The Storm that Bears your Name, Your Attraction to Sharp Machines, and Word Problems. All three of these books, individually and as a group, are interesting explorations of the ways in which we look at the world, define the world, and how that comes into conflict when that world-view inevitably collides with others’. Mahaney develops this conversation not only through content, but on a language and line level, creating evocatively beautiful yet at times eerie and tense images throughout his work. These are reads that will evoke complicated emotions and questions within the reader, and ring bells close to home for anyone who tends to stray from the paths of what their society deems conventional thought patterns and experiences.

The Storm that Bears your Name does so through the voice of a husband and father dealing with the grief of having lost his son. This book is split into three sections, and each departs further from what would be considered standard reality as the speaker sinks deeper into an increasingly isolated grief. Mahaney explores the ways in which we communicate with one another in this collection, and how they inevitably fail when it comes to anything important, as the speaker details in the first section the games he and his wife used to play during their courtship, and the narratives he told his son.

These narratives range from reimagined cultural facts and histories throughout the first section before moving closer to the speaker’s personal life as we move into the second. By the third section, in a move both beautifully small and immensely painful, the framing of these sections moves from “A story I told my son” to “A story I never told my son” —underscoring the frequent missed opportunities and failures we face in connecting with others, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes due to timing, and sometimes due to misunderstandings that shut down our desire to connect at all. This last bit is especially present and prevalent in the speaker’s interactions with his wife, which grow increasingly strained by their inability to express their grief to one another:

Sometimes I see a black horse breathing heavy in the middle of the street. It always happens between three and four in the morning, an hour I never used to find myself awake, but since we moved to the new town I’ve been sleeping less and less because of the cold. The first time I told her about the horse she dismissed it as a trick of the light, a symptom of my sleep-deprived mind, so I don’t bother talking about it anymore.

The Storm that Bears your Name, 43

The collection itself pushes away from simple expressions of emotion and narrative as it progresses, partially eclipsing the death of the son with an increasingly strange landscape in which giant fish hooks fall from the sky, and ghostly boys crowd the branches of the trees. These surreal elements are both stunningly beautiful yet eerie and tense in how they are crafted, leaving the reader in a state of dissonance where they are simultaneously enchanted yet anxious and terrified (which is one of my personal favorite states to be in; it is a very fae-feeling.)

The boys in the trees have been descending again. Last night they left a message hidden in the body of a deer. I found it on its side, curled tight around the trunk of an ancient pine. Its stomach was swollen with mice. Some of them woke when my flashlight hit and their pink little legs started kicking. My wife would ask me why I keep going back to the forest, why I think a dead animal means something more. But I know what I saw. I know what direction the mice were headed.

The Storm that Bears your Name, 87.

You Attraction to Sharp Machines has a narrative, but this narrative is presented in an even more fragmented and subjective way, following the detainment of Isabelle, a girl/woman in an unnamed Institution. Like The Storm that Bears your Name, this book is split into three sections, but we depart from having one particular speaker guiding the way in which we see the world. Instead, we are given four distinct voices within the collection; diary entries from Elizabeth’s sister, the notes of the doctor(s?) studying Elizabeth, Elizabeth in replies to the doctor(s?), and Isabelle’s admirer, Jonah Bell. These different voices call to question how our interpretations of an event, of a person, can vary so wildly, and how much of our identity is in the hands of others and their assumptions. Each voice other than her own has their own view of Isabelle, and one has to wonder if her erratic responses to the doctors, the feral mask she makes—aren’t a form of self-defense against their imposing narratives and demands that she conform to them.

You scribble and scratch while I am cleaning out the kitchen. I don’t like cleaning the kitchen. I want to play the piano and get the keys all dirty.

Your Attraction to Sharp Machines, 19

The clinical language of the doctors contrasted with Isabelle’s own voice is especially jarring and effective in exploring how our linguistic differences define our world-view, and our world-views develop our linguistic differences.

Mahaney brings this conversation to the forefront of his newest work, Word Problems, which presents itself in form as a series of standardized test questions, while the content, the language, is dealing with poetic examinations of individuality, nature, and exclusion. Just as standardized tests often exclude and complicate student’s ability to understand what is asked of them, Mahaney disrupts the reader’s ability to find steady ground within the work. Sometimes, we are given accessibility to the emotional heart of the collection through straight-forward snippets centered on a particular individual or image, as if we are being given a close-up within a film, but this sense of centered sentimentality will only last a moment before Mahaney brings us back into the strange and distances the text with the language of bureaucracy.

A woman drags her hands through silt. The cloud dispersed obscures her first impression, so she seeks a second prompt. She reminds herself that harbors can erode in southern spirals. She practices apologizing.

Word Problems, 10

The resulting dissonance, a word that I find myself applying often to Mahaney’s work, simultaneously pushes reader’s away while drawing them in, creating a confusion that clarifies the emotional states and internal processes of his characters even though they remain abstractions. It’s a complicated narrative move that requires obvious patience, planning, and practice on the author’s part. Through out all three of the collections I read from Mahaney, it was very clear that he is an author who brings these elements into each text, planning and directing each small piece to add up to a greater meaning, even as each small piece works to disrupt other conventional modes of building meaning.