The Case of the Six-Sided Dream

The poems that make up Matthew Monte’s collection, The Case of the Six-Sided Dream, are a study in love and nature, the temporal world and razor-sharp longings and regrets. The imagery and language makes the reader “greet the fact of this body: bones and sinew in delicious revolt.” We have the pleasure of standing with the poet and experiencing his vivid narration, “a crystal palace crowded with flora craning for light.” The poems explore subjects of journeys and longing, and finding comfort in the rituals of modern life, all the while showing us the tiny details that make us alive, “litter the ground with spare change, silvery bread crumbs leading to…hope.” I was especially entranced by Hitchhiking in Waiatarua, its reflexive form, and smattering on the page, “silt settled puddle-cupped and clean.”  I’m so excited for his readers to hold such a beauty in their hands.

Matthew M. Monte grew up near San Francisco, California and went to the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where he studied botany. His fiction, poetry, book reviews, and essays have appeared in Sidestream, Creosote Journal, Transfer, Ashcan Magazine, The Snackbar Collective, and the Poets 11 Anthologies (2014 and 2016). He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

His debut collection, The Case of the Six-Sided Dream, won the 2017 Blue Light Poetry Prize.

“Matthew Monte has put together a compelling volume of poetry well worth reading by lovers of poetry as well as those who simply want a fresh rendering.  Read him and enjoy and savor!”

 — Michael Krasny, KQED Forum Host

“The poems that make up Matthew Monte’s collection, The Case of the Six-Sided Dream, are a study in love and nature, the temporal world and razor-sharp longings and regrets. The imagery and language makes the reader “greet the fact of this body: bones and sinew in delicious revolt.” We have the pleasure of standing with the poet and experiencing his vivid narration, “a crystal palace crowded with flora craning for light.” The poems explore subjects of journeys and longing, and finding comfort in the rituals of modern life, all the while showing us the tiny details that make us alive, “litter the ground with spare change, silvery bread crumbs leading to...hope.” I was especially entranced by Hitchhiking in Waiatarua, its reflexive form, and smattering on the page, “silt settled puddle-cupped and clean.”  I’m so excited for his readers to hold such a beauty in their hands.”

— Devi S. Laskar, Author of Gas & Food, No Lodging and Anastasia Maps

    (Finishing Line Press, 2017)

“Matthew Monte, son of San Francisco, fuses Jazz modes and Beat rhythms to vivid, incandescent effect. His poems shimmer in the eternal return and marginalia of spiritual quest, exalting in Hindu, Judeo-Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist philosophies that transport the reader to other worlds and time scapes while simultaneously critiquing their theories of knowledge. Botanical imagery blooms and stop-you-dead lines scatter seeds of ideas that take root deep within the reader. What jungle fire, what strewn petals, “what heartbreak is next?” In Monte’s The Case of the Six-Sided Dream, the answer is the journey, the spaces in between.”

— Cordelia Chadwick, Poet, author, founder and editor of the

     Snackbar Collective Press.