04/09/2022
Read these reviews of the recently-released collection of poems "I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember" by Matthew J. Andrews.
“From the beauty of the first poem, to the brilliance of the final line, Matthew J. Andrews’ I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember shepherds the reader through a landscape of familiar stories, but deftly removes the scales from eyes whose spiritual ancestry has become rote. Each poem echoes with elemental refrains—the waves, the soil, the flames, the spirit—and in doing so, lay bare the fragility of the human condition as we wrestle with the numinous. They remind us of what we are made and all that we could become if we are “determined, / for once, to be faithful to something.” The insights in this work will leave the reader breathless, pensive, challenged, jealous, and mindful of how good poetry can be good theology.
–Matthew E. Henry, author of Teaching While Black and Dust & Ashes
“Matthew J. Andrews writes like a curious exile. He plants one foot in this lowly world but stands tiptoe on the other, reaching up to seize the flickering promises of a life still to come. Describing all the tenderness, claustrophobia, hope and lovely strangeness of our being, Andrews’ poems undress their readers through a generous act of understanding realized one line at a time.”
–Aarik Danielsen, arts journalist and Fathom Magazine columnist
“At once restrained and grand, practical and transcendent, gritty and gentle, Matthew J. Andrews’ I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember is an ambitious and sweeping literary feat, recounting the Scriptural narrative through the eyes of those who lived it while remaining refreshingly contemporary. Andrews is a poet to be read, watched, and imitated, as well as a minister to be comforted by.”
–Riley Bounds, Editor of Solum Press and author of Hands of Years
