The Dug-Up Gun Museum

"Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms"--

About the author

Matt Donovan is the author of two previous collections of poetry – Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press 2017) and Vellum (Mariner 2007) as well as a book of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). Donovan’s work has been published in numerous literary journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Believer, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Seneca Review, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. In 2017, he received a Creative Capital Grant for Inheritance, a collaborative multimedia chamber opera based on the life of Sarah Winchester. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

Summary

Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms.

Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum confronts our country’s obsession with guns to explore America’s deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. Taking its title from an actual museum located in Wyoming, this collection of poems interrogates our country’s history of gun violence, asking questions about our fetishization of weapons, how mass shootings and the killing of unarmed civilians by police have become normalized, and the multitudinous ways in which firearms are ingrained in our country’s culture. 

Much like the poet himself, Donovan’s poems are dynamic and constantly in motion as he explores the ways in which capitalism and its relentless stream of content have led to a collective desensitization in the face of violence. In turns harrowing, elegiac, and ironic, set in locations ranging from Cody to Chicago, from Las Vegas to Sandy Hook, The Dug-Up Gun Museum probes America’s failures, bizarre infatuations, and innumerable tragedies linked to guns.

Foreword

• Poem to be featured on The Slowdown, hosted by Ada Limón
• National advertising: Academy of American Poets newsletter

• Outreach to online media and bloggers including Ariel Levy at The New Yorker, Tess Taylor at NPR, the Boston Review, Jana Prikyl at The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Randolph at Vassar Quarterly, and David Ulin at Lit Hub.
  

• Excerpts in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Brevity, The Common, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, On the Seawall, Southern Humanities Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.
  

• eBooks will be available on the print publication date.
  

• Buy-ins to relevant academic conferences, trade shows, and relevant publications. Currently considering: American Library Association Annual Meeting, CBSD Sales and Academic catalogs, etc.
  

• Fall book announcements submitted to Publishers Weekly.
  

• Online/social media campaign: Extensive promotion through BOA’s website, blog, e-newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. Giveaway and Instagram takeover planned through BOA’s Instagram.
  

Additional text

“In The Dug-Up Gun Museum, Matt Donovan is anthropologist, empath, parent, skeptic, participant-observer, critic, and mourner, as he takes us on a riveting tour (and indictment) of America’s gun culture. These profoundly moving and wildly expansive documentary poems travel through NRA Headquarters, Emergency Rooms, school hallways, memorials, museums, battle reenactments, police test-firing ranges, crime scenes, and historical sites searching for answers to an elusive question: how can this country be as hypervigilant as it is careless when it comes to the lives of its citizens? With equal parts curiosity, grief, and rage, Donovan limns a clear-eyed hymn to one of the most pressing national issues of our time.”

                                                                               — Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk and Holy Moly Carry Me

“Matt Donovan’s The Dug Up Gun Museum should be required reading and at the center of any conversation concerning 2nd Amendment rights.  Unlike most of these conversations, though, Donovan’s collection is complex, nuanced, and is not at all shy about cutting to the heart of the matter.  In verse, prose poems, and lyric essays, Donovan holds up a mirror to America, so that we may, as Yusef Komunyakaa once wrote, ‘see and know the terror we are made of.’”

                                                                                         — John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

“In The Dug-Up Gun Museum, Matt Donovan unearths and deconstructs that icon of material culture in the haunted museum that is American culture — the gun. Awhirl with pop cultural references and inhabiting an array of forms, from documentary poetry to poems that teeter on essay to the lush anaphoric spillage of the title poem, Donovan disinters, bravely, the gun fetish at our core, where ‘the slash of police tape…is the only horizon / that matters just now,’ and even the night sky is ‘a black cloth riddled with holes.’ I am moved by the speaker’s anger, his fear, and his tenderness. In his tenacious witnessing of the ultimate mechanism of invulnerability, he makes himself vulnerable.”

                                                                                                                           — Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

Product details

• Authors: Matt Donovan
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 08.11.2022, delayed
• EAN: 9781950774753
• ISBN: 978-1-950774-75-3
• No. of pages: 96
• Series: American Poets Continuum Series
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; POETRY / American / General, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Family