Dug-Up Gun Museum

Matt Donovan is the author of two previous collections of poetry – Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press) and Vellum (Mariner) as well as a book of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press). Donovan’s work has been published in numerous literary journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Believer, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Seneca Review, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. In 2017, he received a Creative Capital Grant for Inheritance, a collaborative multimedia chamber opera based on the life of Sarah Winchester. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

“In The Dug-Up Gun Museum, Matt Donovan is anthropologist, empath, parent, skeptic, participant-observer, critic, and mourner, as he takes us on a riveting tour (and indictment) of America’s gun culture. These profoundly moving and wildly expansive documentary poems travel through NRA Headquarters, Emergency Rooms, school hallways, memorials, museums, battle reenactments, police test-firing ranges, crime scenes, and historical sites searching for answers to an elusive question: how can this country be as hypervigilant as it is careless when it comes to the lives of its citizens? With equal parts curiosity, grief, and rage, Donovan limns a clear-eyed hymn to one of the most pressing national issues of our time.”— Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk and Holy Moly Carry Me“Matt Donovan’s The Dug Up Gun Museum should be required reading and at the center of any conversation concerning 2nd Amendment rights.  Unlike most of these conversations, though, Donovan’s collection is complex, nuanced, and is not at all shy about cutting to the heart of the matter.  In verse, prose poems, and lyric essays, Donovan holds up a mirror to America, so that we may, as Yusef Komunyakaa once wrote, ‘see and know the terror we are made of.’”— John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry“In The Dug-Up Gun Museum, Matt Donovan unearths and deconstructs that icon of material culture in the haunted museum that is American culture — the gun. Awhirl with pop cultural references and inhabiting an array of forms, from documentary poetry to poems that teeter on essay to the lush anaphoric spillage of the title poem, Donovan disinters, bravely, the gun fetish at our core, where ‘the slash of police tape…is the only horizon / that matters just now,’ and even the night sky is ‘a black cloth riddled with holes.’ I am moved by the speaker’s anger, his fear, and his tenderness. In his tenacious witnessing of the ultimate mechanism of invulnerability, he makes himself vulnerable.”— Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets