Advanced Praise for There’s Something Elemental In The Way You Say Goodbye

  • From fossils and rainforests to rounds of hide and seek, "There’s Something Elemental In The Way You Say Goodbye" feels both panoramic and microscopic at once. Like John Keats before her, Carol Matos embraces negative capability, confronting the most unknowable questions about life and death with an unflinching stare. She asks, “Is this deep stirring / a glimpse into our universe?” And it’s easy to believe that Matos can show us the way. The poet is as comfortable mining what it means to be a grandparent playing pretend as to be a monarch searching for milkweed. An extraordinary new collection.

    — Erica Wright, author of A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife

  • "There’s Something Elemental in the Way You Say Goodbye" is a profound meditation on life. Matos crafts verses that draw us into an intimate and, at times, tumultuous world. Each poem calls on us to live in the moment in spite of our deepest anxieties, and I find myself returning to poem after poem in the hopes of heeding Matos’s inspirational call.

    — Vaughn M. Watson, author of going out & being normal 

  • There is a double exposure at work in Matos’s "There’s Something Elemental In The Way You Say Goodbye"— the poems look at life and also past it, the way one looks through a window at dusk and sees both the garden and one’s reflection. “I too am not / without end,” she offers, almost in passing. One finishes the book changed, without quite knowing when.

    — Cynthia Clifford, whose poems have appeared in Witness Magazine and other publications

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Praise For The Hush Before the Animals Attack

  • Carol Matos explores the multitude haunting pauses, which rob language and make any spoken sentiment empty in her wonderful collection "The Hush before the Animals Attack". The speakers in her collection do not reflect upon the chosen quiet instances in life, the deliberate silent states brought on by reflection or convention, but instead make vivid those vast in between spaces which singularly steal our voices in times of hurting or want, longing and memory.

    — Michael Wayne Hampton (Fjords Review)

  • These fraught and urgent poems inhabit the anticipation implied by "before" as well as the uneasy minefield of recollection's "after." Narrative here fragments and reassembles as it is pressed into service to convey trauma, terrors, longing, and absence. Matos selects her details as a surgeon chooses instruments: this makes for a poetry of precision and necessity that probes with no easy consolation but with great intimacy and depth.

    — Jeanne Marie Beaumont

  • This collection is a rare combination of intensity and intimacy, terror and lyricism. The voices that interest Matos are untamable-they contain suspense as they wrestle with sexuality, aging, and the all-too-familiar emotion of fear when tragedy looms. The centerpiece of the book is a series of elegies, which trace the unbearable grief of losing a loved one. While they don't offer comfort, they offer companionship. Although the title poem is not an elegy, the poems admit that life is hard but the defiant keep going. You might be winded by the poems' collusion of beauty and violence, but you will not shy away from them.

    — Erica Wright, author of A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife

  • Carol Matos' poetry is restless and relentless, a brave, sometimes raw, always deeply felt exploration of the physical and emotional experience of desire and longing, of sexuality, of love and of loss.

    Genya Turovskaya

  • These poems hold tight to the obsessions that endure when precious life is pummeled.

    Emily Fragos, author of Hostage