Sweet Boy by Matthew Petit

Matthew Petit’s debut presents a clear-eyed portrayal of a post-industrial Great Lake city populated by Sweet Boy and his childhood friends, among them an adult speaker-narrator who is both part of this group and not, with them and without, observant and yet distant. That is, until the midpoint of the collection, when his full attention turns to his beloved, spinning the collection from past to present, from tragedy to comedy, from elegy to aubade. Introspective, and packed full of explosive, image-saturated poems that consistently deliver multilayered sonic pleasures, Sweet Boy is a confident, language-loving debut that announces the arrival of a new poet to watch.

—Molly Gaudry

A brave and original voice leads us through the poems in Sweet Boy. The pleasure of this collection is witnessing the evolving self of the speaker, how he begins ensconced in the neighborhood of “7th North Street” and then finds his own identity, shaped by but now distinct from the community. Juxtapositions of wild, natural imagery with the gray urban landscapes of upstate New York imbue these poems with a unique mythic resonance. At once steely and intimate, these poems invite us to sit with the world in all its beauty and terror.

—Christine Kitano, author of Sky Country

Matthew Petit is a poet from Syracuse, NY. In 2023 he earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Stony Brook University. He currently lives on Long Island, NY.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 64 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-447-5