Matthea Harvey

Matthea Harvey was born in Germany, spent her adolescence in England, and moved to Milwaukee with her family when she was eight years old. She attended Harvard as an undergraduate and the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, Sad Little Breathing Machine, and Modern Life, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

Harvey draws from a wide variety of sources for her poems: music, scraps of conversation, images, and paintings; she identifies herself as "a general gatherer." A reviewer on Bookslut.com commented that Harvey is as much a "conductor as she is a poet: much of her work reads as if she's created a dazzling system and is then pushing language through the structure she's created."

In a review of Modern Life appearing in The New York Times, David Orr described her poems as containing "disconnected phrases . . . abrupt syntactical shifts . . . quirky diction . . . and a tone ranging from daffy to plangent." He singled out her ability to catch the dread of the political climate after September 11, 2001, calling two long sequences "among the most arresting poems yet written about the current American political atmosphere."

Harvey's first children's book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel, is forthcoming from Tin House Books. She is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper, and BOMB, teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn.
(bio adapted from The Poetry Foundation)

Online Resources:

Poetry Foundation profile
Bookslut interview
Harvey's website
NYTimes review of Modern Life
Interview w/ Jeannine Hall Gailey
On KCRW's Bookworm (audio)

Selected Bibliography:

Modern Life (Graywolf 2007)

No One Will See Themself in You (Delirium Press 2005)

Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf 2004)

Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books 2000)