Somebody Else Sold the World

Pengiun Books, 80 Pages, 5-1/2 x 8-7/16, ISBN 9780143136446, $20.00
July 2021
Order: Penguin / Your local bookstore (Indiebound)

From the publisher:  A resonant new collection on love and persistence from the author of The Big Smoke, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize . The poems in Adrian Matejka’s newest and fifth collection, Somebody Else Sold the World, meditate on the ways we exist in an uncontrollable world: in love and its aftermaths, in families that divide themselves, in protest-filled streets, in isolation as routines become obsolete because of lockdown orders and curfews. Somebody Else uses past and future touchstones like pop songs, love notes, and imaginary gossip to illuminate those moments of splendor that persist even in exhaustion. These poems show that there are many possibilities of brightness and hope, even in the middle of pandemics and revolutions.

Praise & Reviews

"Somebody Else Sold the World is an excellent resource for figuring out how to exist during times that are 'as hard-pressed / & tremulous as us.' It coaxes us to notice those tectonic melodies that infiltrate everything around, behind, and in front of us, but especially the rhythm of silence—the place where you might hear yourself the most." 
—Tryn Brown, Rain Taxi

“With blazing virtuosity, Matejka returns in prime form for a wildly syncopated romp—ballasted with earth and music and bombast—serving all the right notes. These poems slyly sit at the intersection of revelation and delicious formal audacity, ‘magnificent & stark inside the addendum, like a big breath exhaled through the best part of a question mark.’” 
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

“Adrian Matejka's muscular and mellifluous soundtrack is a savvy directive that reminds us that even chaos has a rhythm you can dance to. With a masterful ear for lyric and eye for the detail that jolts and surprises, the poet adroitly reintroduces us to a world where a simple breath was never too much—here are reminders of love’s fractured mechanics, the heart-rending frailty of fathers, that twinge in the belly at the first downbeat of that song. Matejka even manages to dismantle that wee icon of violence—the bullet—until it is bared of its sin, its ability to end every story it enters. In Somebody Else Sold the World, we revisit the life we were living before the life we’re scarcely living now.” 
—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art

“Rather than choosing between despair and naive optimism, Somebody Else Sold the World offers us continual possibility—the possibilities that depend on human ingenuity, choice, and action”
 — Rhino  

“You feel grateful to Matejka for using his laser-wrought wordcraft to name the loud and quiet forms of pain endured in 2020. And while Somebody Else Sold the World is never a casual read, it is bingeable, and able to be played in one sitting, swallowed whole, with one caveat: chew thoroughly.”
— Pattern