Elliptical and interior, Louise Mathias’s What If the Invader is Beautiful is a book of pastoral like no other. Born of the West’s open spaces and the haunted towns that live on their edges, Mathias’s targeted lines hit sharply as arrows, and feel as decisive as a runoff creek melting over boulders in a cold mountain June. These poems offer an inoculating pain, a linguistic acupuncture that transforms fear by intensifying perception and awareness. Mathias has the vulnerability of Townes Van Zandt, the cunning of Emily Dickinson, and the storyteller’s gift of Cormac McCarthy—but her work is all her own. It feels clandestine, reckless and true, and it should be shared as abundantly as an open secret.
—Katie Peterson
The exquisite and wholly original poems in Louise Mathias’s What if the Invader is Beautiful lead the reader through the violence and sorrow of what it is to be human. Through the Americana of motels and truck stops, the Southern California landscape of desert and ruin, its barren landscape glittering with the beauty and detritus of ghost flowers, lupine, lilies, ponies and “some kind of sister poppy.” Indeed, these poems wrestle with the question of what it is to be human. In “Fathoms,” the poem’s speaker is the recipient of a “once-husband’s” command to “Act like a human,” as if they had somehow slid beneath the level of human, down to that of animal. Which is to say, the poems also ask what it is to be reduced to animal. The poems, submerged as they are in flora and fauna and the wondrous presence of animals, show us also what it might mean to return to our original second nature—nature, itself. We are all animals. Or, as Mayakovsky writes, “We are all of us horses, to some extent!” What makes us human is that we are also animal. It is when we make an attempt at bridging the two that human freedom is found, as Mathias writes in “Larrea:” “Moved the jackrabbit / from the road, laid her under / a bush. Land of little / shade, we do what we can.”
—Cynthia Cruz
Louise Mathias takes poetry into frightening places. Or is it the other way round? “No word / is ever safe” is a truth these words, sharp as knives, can vouch for. They accept that art may be violence “as a peony / is violence.” (I think “peony” is a word that would like to turn into “poem.”) Let these poems pierce you with their truth and beauty.
—Barry Schwabsky
