Urn and Drum by Lila Matsumoto

"The world within Urn and Drum is a cornucopia of shapes, colours, and objects, fashioned almost as a gleeful, surreal picture-book; a playful naivety that leads to serious questions of what it means to exist and feel in the world. Through linguistic dexterity and play, [these poems] exclaim heartbreak and test the limits of language in a single line." —Rachael Allen

 

 

"In exquisite rituals of embodied and object orientated writing, Lila Matsumoto’s breath-taking new collection of poetry combines lightness of expression with a thrilling complexity of thought and emotion. There is joy and jouissance in this collection in abundance." —Colin Herd

 

"In Lila Matsumoto’s poems, a hyperintense focus on things felt and seen leads not to description, but to a parallel intensity of focused and patterned sound.  From self-help muesli to grief bacon, these word-incursions of “unspeakable / loss + bliss” are worth a thousand pictures; alternate soundtracks for imaginary films."

—Peter Manson