Reviews of “Sad Little Breathing Machine”
"To know a machine we study it; we disassemble the many parts. To
enjoy the machine we are still' we listen and watch as it works. In Matthea
Harvey's Sad Little Breathing Machine both pleasures are afforded us as
the collection's six component parts balance new varieties of poem-types
and uncannily tick and tock in service of the machine's heart, a heart
motivated by invention and playfulness but trouble by real questions of
time, memory, and perception."
—Sally
Keith, Colorado Review
"That Harvey achieves a coherent philosophical position
in Sad Little Breathing Machine is admirable; that she does so with such
wit and nonchalance is brilliant…. We trust her despite her indulgence
in apparent lunacy, because she keeps her cool in the presence of intractable
strangeness and doubt…Her laughter's brave, but not bitter, and
her magnanimity's contagious: We want to catch whatever it is she's got.
Even if it kills us."
—Jonathan
Weinert, Harvard Review
"This book is full of tiny music boxes; peer into them,
hear the songs and fall into strange, glittering and familiar abysses."
—Matthew
Zapruder, BOMB Magazine
"Harvey's quick and delightful faux narratives are
like surrealism on a treadmill; they spurn under their feverish feet both
dull fact and the gossamer weave of dreams. They have lost a steadying
sense of ground. They flicker and flit."
—Cal
Bedient, Boston Review
"Harvey is a master of the surprising, illuminating
connection-the cognitive jump-cut. Harvey pursues in her second book a
delicate, witty, lacerating, elusive lyric project…There is something
of the Martian about Harvey…her disjunctions, reversals and bizarreries
arise from her inquiry into the strangeness of sentience itself-how odd
it is to think, feel and look."
—Maureen
McLane, The Chicago Tribune