Town Crier reviewed by Kate Liebman in the Brooklyn Rail: “Poignantly, Matthes associates death and dying with changing states of matter in the natural world. In linking the profane with the sacred and dailiness with faith, Town Crier is both accessible and miraculous.”
Interview with Chloe Sarbib from Alma: “Sarah, who won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book prize through Persea Books, has a voice that’s both very funny (her timing is good, somehow, even on the page) and achingly sad. Town Crier is also extremely Jewish: It contains not one, but two poems called “Golem.” In the second, debuting in Alma today, the author sculpts a golem from all the hair she’s ever removed from her body; in the first, Adam benefits from his lack of rib to do an activity of which many men dream. (Just read it.)”
Town Crier interview with Gabrielle Grace Hogan from Full Stop. “In an exquisite excavation of grief, love, and loss, Matthes finds herself a leading contemporary voice in American poetry. As deeply funny as it is moving and sad, Matthes balances the comedy/tragedy masks with powerful hands in this collection dedicated to and intrinsically informed by her friendship with the late poet Max Ritvo.”
Conversation with Andy Sia and Mason Wray from Yalobusha Review: “One place I see the thingness of faith at play is in the attention to the material realities and sustenance of the body. Food counteracts, yet is dependent on, death. Encountering ‘one chipmunk / facedeep / in second, dead chipmunk,’ the speaker asks in the opening poem: ‘What kind of mind / is unable to recognize the difference // between a chipmunk in mourning / and a chipmunk at lunch.’ But food is not merely pragmatic or sustaining. It promises a kind of transgressive pleasure, for example, when the speaker eats blackberries and notices the “juice bursting out of black balloons” or when she entertains the thought of consuming the “living” bodies of cicadas.”
Town Crier reviewed by Michelle Anne Schingler from Foreword Reviews: “Filled with reminders of human fragility, but still exalting life in vigorous tones, Sarah Matthes’s debut poetry collection, Town Crier, is a momentous introduction to a sensitive voice.”
“The Seventeen Year Cicadas” featured on Palette Poetry’s feature on Eros by Kim Harvey: “Matthes shows how one innocent touch, even just brushing a cicada off the friend’s neck, can change everything when there is an unexpected heat.”