What is thinking, and where do thoughts come from? Rohrer, in a state of startling tranquillity, looks within and without for answers and delivers an astounding array of possibilities, sometimes reaching into the ephemeral (“I wake indistinguishable from the washed-out morning”) and sometimes happily insular (“I feel like I really am my thoughts”). Either way, the act of connecting—to one's own mind, to the world outside of the mind and to both simultaneously—is the supreme thrust of the book, and it is impossible to resist participating in this nonchalant adventure in metaphysical perception. [ ... ]

—Publishers Weekly, June 2009

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A Plate of Chicken is a masterpiece of subtlety and frailty, a series of glimpses, thought-fragments, coping devices, and simple declarative sentences. “My function,” Rohrer writes, "is to be in love between two people who hate each other," and to this end he serves the gods of sentence and line simultaneously. This gathering of seven-line stanzas opens a door to a blanket of white noise, like Brian Eno's Music for Airports, and never lets up.

—Lewis Warsh

“Take off your pants, Creepy, and be my love.” Domesticity and poetry are at the heart of these outlandish and tender poems, all seven lines long (or is it one long poem made up of seven line stanzas?), in which collisions are continually occurring, as words and lines of thought bump up against, and rub, each other. Rohrer’s poems are blunt, erotic, romantic, declarative, down to earth, outrageous, funny, sad, and better than any other plate of chicken placed before you in this life. Sit down and enjoy a sumptuous no-frills meal that doesn’t try to fill you with iceberg lettuce.

—John Yau

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Matthew Rohrer is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas (which won the 1994 National Poetry Series Open Competition), Satellite, A Green Light (short listed for the 2005 Griffin International Poetry Prize), and Rise Up. With Joshua Beckman he wrote Nice Hat. Thanks and recorded the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He’s appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing, has been awarded the Avery Hopwood Prize for poetry and a Pushcart Prize, and has been widely anthologized. A chapbook-length action/adventure poem They All Seemed Asleep was recently published by Octopus Books. He teaches in the creative writing program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.

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