David Kirby: “I connect Keats’ early death with that of a student and friend, though as I worked on ‘This Living Hand,’ I began to wonder if I was telling too much and betraying an intimacy. So I asked my wife, the poet Barbara Hamby, who said, ‘You have to write that poem—people are already forgetting Tom, and you will keep him alive.’” (website)
Brent Fisk: “I try to nail down a time and place with words. I want an image to walk down a dark hall with just the tip of a cigarette to let you know it’s coming. I want the right words to rise like moths from the grass. Sometimes when you get close enough to accomplishing that readers tap into a poem. They hear the floorboards creak. They hear the window rattle. They see the moon exactly as I describe it. Getting that close is like finding a wad of money in an old shirt’s pocket.”
Michael Jon Khandelwal: “When I lived in Los Angeles, every day, a man would walk by my house shouting—I investigated and found he was selling fresh corn. Something about that touched me, reminded me of my days living in Virginia, days when I would explore the cornfields. I was astonished by this man, and how his words—in a language I didn’t know—sparked my memory so vividly. Of course, I wrote a poem about this man and his corn, as poems, for me, come from the astonishing experience of living.”
When Mather Schneider met Josie she was an illegal immigrant from Mexico working at McDonald’s in Tucson and he was a cab driver who went to McDonald’s to buy coffee each day. One day she poured his coffee, then placed a small piece of paper over his money and slid it back to him on the counter. With that gesture she gave him a reason to get up in the morning. She also gave him more trouble than he wanted, more bliss than he could have imagined, and a coupon for a free Egg McMuffin.
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Praise for A Bag of Hands
This twelve-poem, thirty-one-page collection layers a cross-border love story, battling the absurdities of immigration policy, into a hope-giving romance that illuminates daily epiphanies. Economic and minimal, while sweeping the micro into the macro, Schneider’s writing lands somewhere between a Tom Waits’s lyric sung by a ranchero who has read Bukowski, and a Californian rom-com. Avoiding the possible pitfalls of cliché, such as the white American as savior complex; the bitter, working class, underdog syndrome; or sappy melodrama, A Bag of Hands holds up ignorance and love side by side, leaving a heart-rendering optimistic aftertaste.
—DM O’Connor, on NewPages
I love the poems in this contest-winning chapbook. They’re all about Mather’s life as an American cab driver married to an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He writes about their love, her struggle to stay in the country, his passengers, flat tires, bigotry, and a bag of severed hands found in Mexico. The poems are easy to read but deceptively powerful.
—Sue Fagalde Lick, in Goodreads
Mather Schneider was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1970. He attended several colleges but never attained a degree. After living in Washington State, he moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1997, where he married a Mexican woman and began traveling in Mexico. Schneider has worked many jobs and for many years drove a taxi. He has published several hundred poems and stories, and is author of four full-length collections, most recently Pricklyfrom New York Quarterly Books.
Charles Manis: “My first semester in college, I crowded into an auditorium full of students, faculty, and various other folks around town who had come to hear Charles Simic read. After we filled up the seats and the floor, a line formed through the doors and into the hall outside the auditorium. That night I walked back to my dorm trying to hold onto lines that Simic had read to us, and the next semester I enrolled in my first courses in writing and reading poetry. I hope only to write something that somebody will want to remember.”
Susan B.A. Somers-Willett: “It is the music of language—the odd and perfect run of phrase, the rhythm of it ringing in your head for days—that compels me to write. I believe that how you speak the poem is just as important as what you say in it. Which means, of course, that Aretha Franklin is my favorite poet.” (website)
Megan Moriarty: “For me, a poem is a place where everything is possible. Life can be stopped and rewound. Through writing, you can look at that possibility, and see what impossibilities—what human things—keep showing up anyway.”