Matt Frati

My name's Matt and I'm a poet. I despised poetry when it was forced on us in school. Somehow, I found my own way to get into it and now it's pretty much all I do. I've been writing poetry and short stories since I was about sixteen and since graduating from Rhode Island College back in 2011 have been trying to get published but to no avail. In early 2015 I began looking into self-publishing as a way to share my growing stockpile of poems with other people and in April of that year I released "Nightingale Blues" a collection of about forty of my favorite poems written during the previous four years or so. Much to my surprise, I discovered I had enough poems for a second, even longer book, so after polishing up some older poems and writing a few new ones, I began work on what became my second poetry book "Standing in the Shadows of Giants", which I released on Dec. 8th, 2015. On Sept. 6, 2016 I self-published my debut novel, "A Leap in the Dark." It's a fictionalized account of a crucial period in my life when I was bouncing from one odd job to another and trying to be a writer and the turbulent relationship with a mysterious woman which altered the course of my previously mundane life, both on and off the page. On April 7th, 2017, I released my third volume of poetry, "Weapons of Mass Distraction". My main poetic influences are the beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs), Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, Leonard Cohen and especially Charles Bukowski, among others still. I tend to write from a personal, sometimes confessional place about my experiences, feelings and thoughts as I try (with much trouble and confusion) to navigate my way through this very messy world of ours. I often try to uncover the profound and insightful aspects hidden within the mundane occurrences of everyday life. Therefore, my work tends to hit upon a plethora of personal/universal themes such as the dichotomy of love and hate, the pleasures and pains of drink, the drudgery of work, the majesty of nature, the utter madness of the world and the beautiful unknowing of this common trial called life. I like to think my readers (all three of them) can find traces of themselves within these poems.