Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA Editions, 2022) confronts our country’s obsession with guns to explore America’s deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. With what poet Erika Meitner calls “equal parts curiosity, grief, and rage,” this new collection interrogates our country’s history of gun violence, asking questions about our fetishization of weapons, how mass shootings and the killing of unarmed civilians by police have become normalized, and the multitudinous ways in which firearms are ingrained in our country’s culture. Donovan is the author of two additional poetry collections, as well as a book of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape (Trinity University Press, 2016). He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. He serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. 

Matt Donovan will read on November 1, 2022 at 7 p.m. in Leo Weinstein Auditorium. Livestreams of this reading will be found on Facebook and YouTube.

Featured Poems by Matt Donovan:

The Wrong Question More Than Once
Here the Thing with Feathers Isn’t Hope