Blood Work - Tapa blanda

A book that simultaneously tickles you and shakes you by the scruff of your neck. These poems resist the dualities of lyric versus narrative, confessional versus impersonal, real against surreal, formal/improvisational, comic/sad. Matthew Siegel manages to tick off all the boxes at once, while remaining compulsively readable.
Lucia Perillo

The deceptive directness of Siegel s debut is remarkable; in his capable hands, illness reveals how barely contained any human being is, and how we reach, alone and together, for whatever will hold us.
Mark Doty

"Siegel's poems see the world with an immediacy and compassion that could only come from the decision to be vulnerable. It's such a simple-seeming principle of poetry--yet it is as rare as hen's teeth. I honor this young poet for the freshness and skill in these poems, his allegiance to the most unpretentious areas of experience, and his courage-teaching heart. "Blood Work" is a wonderful first book." --Tony Hoagland

Shortlisted for Forward First Collection Prize 2015

I wear this living skin
wear it in the sunlight,

in the forest, in the city
wear it like a suit

of metal, a suit of gauze