Rocketflower
by Matthew Thomas Meade
AWARDS
C&R Press Summer Tide Pool 2021 Chapbook Selection
ABOUT
Rocketflower is a collection of stories about the burgeoning relationship between a parent and a child. Full of messy tenderness and complicated hurts, the mosaic shaped by these stories reveals a broader overstory that wonders what it means to be human. Narrated by an often perplexed, sometimes agitated, and always curious new father, each of these tales is a message pressed into wet cement, a sigil knifed into the trunk of a tree, initials tagged in spray paint on the side of an old delicatessen; language misused to get to the untidy truth of things. The result is a work that is earnest, raw, whimsical, and furiously honest.
PRAISE
“With humor and grace and a whirlwind of feeling, Matthew Meade explores the complexities of fatherhood and all the curiosities it contains. Rocketflower is part ode to a childhood sense of wonder and part elegy for its gradual loss. This is a delightful and moving collection, filled with stories that will allow you to catch a glimpse of something mysterious, fleeting, and real.”
–Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route and Mezzanines
“Meade has some George Saunders to him. He possesses that scythe-sharp wit that razes easy answers, so he can show us the beauty and indignity of human truth.”
–Joshua Mohr, author of the memoir Sirens and the novel Damascus
“Matt Meade’s brilliant new chapbook Rocketflower captures the relationship between parent and child with humor, charm, and almost unbearable poignance. In one of this collection’s five gem-like pieces, the narrator/Dad’s four-year-old son laments, ‘I don’t have enough eyes,’ when something is beyond his understanding. Be assured that author Meade has the ‘eyes,’ skill, and depth to earn the confidence not only of his son, but also of his readers. ‘Every childhood is identical in its complete and total uniqueness,’ Meade writes. The original and personal observations offered in Rocketflower lay down a treasure map all parents striving to connect with their offspring would do well to follow.”
–Gregory J. Wolos, author of Kika Kong vs. the Dead White Males
“In Rocketflower, Matt Meade writes lyrically about parenting, its absurdity and consequence. But in the process, as his protagonists move deep into their children’s worlds, he writes about childhood just as convincingly. As a father, I’m shattered and glued back together by each of these stories; as a writer, I’m envious to the point of rage. Always playful, often genre-bending, they resist the confines of a single mood or message. Like parenthood itself, they change you.”
–Noah Kucij winner of Phyllis Hurd Liston Poetry Prize
“The stories in Rocketflower establish Matt Meade as the heir apparent to the most dangerous job in American literature–mapping the fractured mind of the working class male. Where we had Denis Johnson to recover loneliness, and Junot Diaz to recast heartbreak, we now have Meade to illuminate fatherhood in all its haunting ambiguities.”
–Dan Leach, author of Dead Mediums
About the Author
Matthew Thomas Meade
Matt Meade’s fiction has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Sou’wester, The Saturday Evening Post, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. Some of his work, as well as the one good picture he has of himself, can be found at matthewthomasmeade.com. He no longer smokes.
