BRING ME MY ABSOLUTE SURRENDER
BRING ME MY ABSOLUTE SURRENDER
debut book of poems turned ebook, originally released/printed by Plain Wrap Press in 2014
“Bring Me My Absolute Surrender is an exploration of perceptual reality and the weirdness of being alive. Sherling creates a portrait of human experience at the intersection of the mind’s eye and the tangible world (which may or may not exist). In spire of their admission of unknowing—and maybe even because of it—these poems puke a little map to enlightenment.” – Melissa Broder
“I don’t write blurbs anymore but I will for Matthew Sherling. This is a book that doesn’t need a blurb. It’s going to creep up on you and make you surrender. It will. You know this. It’s okay to allow yourself to be ravished.” – Scott McClanahan
“Matthew Sherling cuts through all the crap that poetry tends to bloat itself with ad instead uses the empty space of the page to create delicate and deliberate sculptures of minimalist poignancy. Bring Me My Absolute Surrender is uninhibited and bold, keen and casual, in the absolute best form. This is precisely the brand of poetry we need more of in our hyperreal, increasingly digital age.” – Michael J Seidlinger
“Matthew Sherling doesn’t sneer at the material world or at human folly, but looks at it with a compassion that expresses itself as song. He is beat in the way Kerouac understood it, always watching for that which is ‘beatific’ in people and in things.” – Edward Mullany
“Matthew Sherling is our digital Buddha and this is the sutra we’ve been waitinf for. There’s a real sense of wonder in these poems, an earnest inquiry into the philosophical, the metaphysical, even the spiritual. But not once does it stray into pretension. There’s always one foot planted firmly in the playful, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Basically, he’s got the poetry game on lock.” – Bob Schofield
“Matthew Sherling’s Bring Me My Absolute Surrender closely considers whow thinking is unleashed or unraveled by the poem’s texture. It microscopes its face against the mountain range of the inverted, considering body. ‘[Because] the terror of indefinite space,’ says Sherling. “[B]ecause the largest flower in the world smells like a dead body.” Through repetition / litany and careful curiosity, Sherling wonders into the grass or the junkyard of the poem, wondering how and when it comes to draw on a life, wondering how to totally invite in its dismantling, wondering ‘who cares if I rehouse myself in a dark thicket’ / how exactly to capture its ability to get richly lost in anything at all.”
Carrie Lorig
review @ Atticus Review
review @ Arbitrary News & Review
review from Beach Sloth
my debut book of poems, originally released by Plain Wrap Press