Featuring a collection of poetry by Matthew Gasda, this book showcases works created between 2011 and 2021, including some previously published pieces. Each poem has been carefully edited for this edition, reflecting the poet's evolving voice and perspective over the years.
The collection features four distinct plays by Matthew Gasda, an acclaimed playwright known for his innovative storytelling and dynamic characters. Each piece showcases his unique voice and perspective, offering a blend of humor and depth that reflects contemporary themes. Gasda's work is celebrated for its engaging dialogue and thought-provoking narratives, making this anthology a significant contribution to modern theater.
Exploring deep philosophical themes through a series of interconnected fragments, this novel invites readers to ponder existence, identity, and the nature of reality. Each section presents a unique perspective, encouraging reflection and interpretation, while weaving together a tapestry of thought-provoking ideas. The fragmented structure allows for a dynamic reading experience, where themes evolve and resonate differently with each reader, fostering a personal connection to the narrative.
Exploring profound themes of friendship, mortality, and the essence of beauty, this original drama delves into the complexities of human relationships. It weaves a narrative that challenges characters to confront their fears and desires, ultimately revealing the transformative power of connection amidst life's inevitable challenges. The emotional depth and poignant moments invite readers to reflect on their own experiences with love and loss.
Poetry. Matthew Gasda's gorgeously contrapuntal ORCHID ELEGY is a long poem that, like a fugue, moves at once backwards and forwards, joining an impulse towards restless exploration and budding divagation with an instinct for recapitulation. Its 179 brief numbered sections are held both together and apart by a semantic tensegrity achieved through graceful thematic stratification; each structural node experiences the quality of its own solitude in resonance with an elegiac melos unfolding around and through it. These parcels of finitude, "petals like the characters of a play," constantly seek, both in form and in thought, the pattern of a lost Eurydice, even in the shifting, retreating presence of the Other, "for the most important category of beauty is the beauty of that which is lost." The spiral of longing persists through love, hunger and death. Yet, something is accomplished, if not necessarily captured, through the turning of this gyre of "lament and encomium." Tracing and dissecting through the alchemy of metaphor the form of the beloved, "slowly the poem emerges from its secret" and "consciousness emerges;" the poem, or the soul, becomes body, and vice versa, "a shared node...transparent-- shining," and with renewed purpose, the elegy of life begins again.
This collection contains the plays Dimes Square, Quartet, Berlin Story, and Minotaur by dramatist Matthew Gasda, following his meteoric rise in New York's downtown scene.