Dual - Poems

A poetry collection examining masculinity, aggression, and violence. In his fourth poetry collection, Matthew Minicucci examines masculinity and gun violence as he brings to life the grammatical concept of the dual, a number that is neither singular nor plural. Though now lost in English, the concept is present in other languages both extant and ancient. The poems�_T forms fittingly include the elegy, palinode, and contrapuntal, which is both a single poem and two poems intertwined. They align contemporary moments with key texts from Western literature, including ancient Greek epics, in a way that helps us reconsider the aggression of young men. �_oThe world kills kind boys,�__ Minicucci writes, and �_owe bury the bodies inside men.�__ Minicucci recategorizes our idea of �_oWest,�__ the Western canon, and the Old West and its bullets, comparing them to modern-day landscapes in Utah, Oregon, Washington, California, and Hawai�_Ti. Whether memorializing a woodworking grandfather or poets Brigit Pegeen Kelly and James Longenbach, Dual notes that loss has a double vision. While weighty in their subjects, Dual�_Ts poems make room for unexpected moments of lightness, such as when the speaker compares the complications of love to �_oreading the Iliad and realizing, sure, there's anger, // but before that there�_Ts just a lot of camping.�__ The book argues, in the end, that there is an unalienable dual between the observer and the observed, the self and the self as confessed to another.