Secret Offices

Secret Offices, Anthony DiMatteo's knockout collection of new poems, brings the reader on a quest for "beauty no one ever courted." A poet of wide-ranging attentions and abilities, DiMatteo moves between the meditative lyric, narrative, ekphrastic wonderings in these supple poems. But his greatest gift is the way eternity gently offers itself in his lines: "this dream to return...and be held again in that gaze." Listen: DiMatteo's a poet I'll follow anywhere so that I too might drink from waters that "murmur our thirsty presence."

-Al Maginnes, author of eight collections and the forthcoming Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems

C.K. Williams wrote, "poetry's the most intimate art; it's the voice of one person's mind and musicalized language speaking directly to the listening mind of someone else." Anthony DiMatteo does a masterful job of doing precisely that. His poem, "That Moment," leads you to see what Courbet paints and turns what he sees into poetry. There's pain and exhilaration from encountering other lives. In "Living for Two," he declares, "You live inside me/ final respite, home." In "Elegy for My Grandmother," he writes, "The best story was how she bore on her back/ a baby grand across a living room." Secret Offices will speak to you. Keep it close at hand when you need to reach another mind.

-Barbara Southard, Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, New York, 2019-2021

Anthony DiMatteo's metaphysical poems ask important questions: "Ever wonder why one runs into fate by accident?/Aren't people better off losing a love that can't be found?/If happiness is in the doing, is sorrow in the being?" Offering no easy answers, he writes fine poems into the questions. He doesn't argue for an a priori soul. One creates it: "...the soul is what one gives away"-in helping, parenting, and keeping the heart open to whatever arrives. You'll want to take these poems to a quiet place. They don't shout: they foster a state of mind we need more of.

-Doug Anderson, author of Undress, She Said, Horse Medicine, and The Moon Reflected Fire, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award