Reviews of Sad Little Breathing Machine

“A young poet to watch.” —Publishers Weekly

“Harvey crafts her poem with so light a touch that on one level, you can hardly tell what it’s about. But it avoids spinning into annoying nonsense. In between the lines, in between the words, resonances arise: echoes of nostalgia, the desire for comfort, the longing for connection. These ideas are, in a way, stronger for not being fully articulated.” —Time Out New York

“This book is full of tiny music boxes; peer into them, hear the songs and fall into strange, glittering and familiar abysses.” —BOMB Magazine

“Harvey is a master of the surprising, illuminating connection—the cognitive jump-cut. Harvey pursues in her second book a delicate, witty, lacerating, elusive, lyric project….Harvey is enormously gifted….This is an excellent, intense book.” —Chicago Tribune

“[Harvey’s] bright creative energy, her gusto, glows like a heater in the wintry rooms of the poems.” —Boston Review

“The new collection is compact and casually confounding, and the poet has found an ease of expression that manages to maintain her thrilling interweavings and juxtapositions. A mischievous glee seems to pop up from stanza to stanza, and the reader is always invited to share in it.” —American Poet

“Matthea Harvey is a poet of haunting wit.” —Poetry Flash

“In this moment of poetic abundance and flagrant imitation, Harvey has found ways of engaging more deeply with language itself than with the current culture of poetry. While many younger poets are clever and funny, few are as conscious of the implications of their sense of humor. With Sad Little Breathing Machine, Harvey has not just written the second book in her journey toward voice, but a good book in its own right.” —American Book Review

“[Sad Little Breathing Machine] is in and of itself an entire world.” —Whistling Shade Literary Review

“The collection’s six component parts balance new varieties of poem-types and uncannily tick and tock in sevice of the machine’s heart, a heart motivated by invention and playfulness but troubled by real questions of time, memory, and perception.”—Colorado Review

“Sharp, incisive wit…imaginative landscapes, where pocket-sized ponies serve as proxies for the depressed and princesses congregate in a walk-infreezer, waiting for numb limbs to remind them of their warm hearts.”—Redactions