“In Flower Compass Sutras, Gretchen Mattox is attuned to those moments when speaking and not speaking are simultaneous: “Didn’t I make you what you are? Didn’t I leave you alone in order to teach you?” Amidst this world of deceit (self and otherwise), the speaker declares: “I am tired of double speak, paradox.” And yet, as much as they veer towards narrative, the powerful and remarkable thing about these poems is that they never devolve into stories or anecdotes, living instead in the realm of music and perception, while opening themselves, like flower, to the dead girl in the refrigerator” and to “love’s errand, to deny and call back.” Mattox’s poems return us to those places where language first began to painfully inhabit us: “Remember how you looked like a little pear in that terrible/pink out-fit Mother (grandma) bought you?” At the same time, in her overlapping of sound and perception, she shows us a way forward: “suds sparkle like spectacular astral clouds.””
—John Yau
“A Sutra, Gretchen Mattox reminds us, is a law or a lesson that leads to enlightenment. Her poems ask: what can the wound teach us? What can the “little flower of combustion”? Wound and beauty walk hand in hand in this haunting, deeply felt, strange and gorgeous book—where dream and memory jostle vividly with the present, where sorrow “weigh(s) a fortune,” where the body “turns into a blue star.””
—Dana Levin
