Ordinary Sun
Henriksen opens Ordinary Sun by insisting that “an eye is not enough.” Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty—rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels… Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate.
Matthew Henriksen was born in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1977. He is the author of two books of poetry from Black Ocean, The Absence of Knowing (2015) and Ordinary Sun (2011). His poems have been anthologized recently in Hick Poetics and The Volta Book of Poets. A co-editor of the online poetry journal Typo, he also edited Another Part of the Flood: Poems, Stories, and Correspondence of Frank Stanford, which appeared in Fulcrum #7. A bookseller and adjunct instructor, he currently lives in the Arkansas Ozarks, where he assists the Northwest Arkansas Prison Stories Project and coaches under-6 girls soccer.
