Fine: Poems

Charting the porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm, Matt Rader conjures a vision of the present from a deep future.

The follow-up to Ghosthawk, Fine is set largely in the Kelowna area of the Okanagan Valley, BC, over the period of June 2021–June 2022. The poems address the extraordinary natural, historical and social events of that period including the June 2021 heat dome and the November 2021 atmospheric river, the ongoing pandemic and resulting social anomie, the public announcement of hundreds of unmarked residential school graves across the country, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a personal level, the poems grapple with questions of disability, illness, trans identity, healing and what a good future might look like. Written in a speculative mood, the poems in Fine look back on the contemporary moment with its terrors and mythopoetic digital scrim from an imagined future, so that the voice itself becomes an incantation, a summoning of a world of survivance and beauty.

“Matt Rader’s Fine is already a classic, as far as I’m concerned. A book I will return to, that I will lend and gift to friends. A book that will become creased and dog-eared and constellated with coffee and tears. I will pick up this book for tender companionship along this road we walk with one foot in the digital world and one on the soil, the road that leads through the incomprehensible losses of climate-collapse but is also always lined with the extraordinary beauty that flowers in the cracks between.”

“Each word in these poems feels so right, so well-chosen it seems to be plucked out of a timeless time yet reaches far into the future. I love this book. Matt Rader gives us the names of things they didn’t even know themselves. He replicates their sound with respect and care, but also their silence. His poems are ‘where I want to go / when I want to be alone / and happy / inside my body.’ Yes!”

“In a time where wildfires are a constant reminder of climate crisis, where masks are worn to help us breathe ‘by restricting our breathing,’ and where railcars haul ‘the inside of mountains’ away from their source, Matt Rader’s Fine seeks refuge in ordinary, everyday moments. But these poems are anything but average—they are the testament of a writer who has spent a lifetime searching for beauty and refining it on the page, a writer who understands the complexities of the human condition enough to freely admit: ‘To say I hurt / people I love / people.’ Fine is a necessary book, set against the new normal.”