Shortlist 2024 JM Abraham Poetry Award* Longlisted for the 2023 BMO Winterset Award*

Poems using fervent whimsy and wordplay to examine photography and seeing.

Peering inside eyeballs, pondering the paradox of absent stars, and meditating on street scenes by André Kertész, these poems squint sidelong at our ways of seeing the world. Through playful poems about photography and visual perception, Hollett dissects auroras and quarks, atmospheric phenomena, potatoes, bomb craters and peat bog cadavers. This darkly comic collection is shadowed by entoptic paparazzi, haunted by peripheral visions. Born of attentive walking and looking, of footsteps and snapshots, it bears witness to art history and alluvial light, portable keyholes, the pandemic, climate change, and the sheer strangeness of seeing everyday things with ecstatic eyes.

Matthew Hollett is an award—winning writer and visual artist in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Album Rock is his first book. Matthew won the 2018 Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem. He was awarded the 2018 Cox & Palmer Sparks Creative Writing Award and the Landfall Trust Residency.
His poetry collection, Optic Nerve, won the 2017 NLCU Fresh Fish Award. He also won the 2017 Prairie Fire Short Fiction Contest, The Malahat Review's 2017 Open Season Award for Creative Nonfiction, and In 2017 he was selected as Newfoundland Quarterly's inaugural Creative Nonfiction Fellow. Matthew was longlisted for the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize.
His writing has been published most recently in Riddle Fence and PRISM International, and previously in anthologies such as The March Hare Anthology and Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. Check out his webpage at http://www.matthewhollett.com/

Matthew Hollett's profile page