The Others unfolds in layers of both complexity of content and technique, beginning in a seemingly simple, straightforward way, developing deeper ideas behind the scenes. . . . Thankfully, Rohrer's skillful storytelling never leaves the reader behind, no matter how far off course from the morning commute his protagonist travels.Andrew Miller, Yes Poetry
Tumbling from one speaker to the next, Matthew Rohrer’s dreamlike novel-in-verse harkens back to a time when poetic language was used, principally, to tell stories. It is experimental and strange but not in a way that alienates its readers. Whether Rohrer’s characters are riding the F train in midtown Manhattan, high in nineteenth-century France, or fending off robot bigfeet, his masterful attention to detail and rhythm absorbs and engages. Each narrative emerges from the one that precedes it, like a Russian nesting doll, producing a sensation of spacious expansion and laying bare the manner by which narratives absorb and give birth to each other. This is a book of trapdoors and weird trips and special delights.—The Believer, Believer Book Award Notification
Wonderfully ambitious and fully realized, Rohrer's The Others engages similar questions of readerly participation and, more specifically, the cultivation of a shared consciousness through art. In the book's sprawling fictive terrain, the constant presence of the other within the self—that eternal alterity—is a shadow story that haunts the narrative proper. As the work unfolds, it is this secret, hidden most of all from the speaker of the poem, that is gradually revealed, understood, and dramatized beautifully in the style of the writing itself.—Kristina Marie Darling, Los Angeles Review of Books
Reading this book is like opening a door to a room and then opening a door within that room to another room and then opening a door within that room to another room and then—you get the point. It’s also: funny, mind-altering, occasionally spooky, and a conceptually brilliant reminder that our lives are filled with stories every single day. —Allie Wuest, Catapult
You should read The Others. It'll do things to you.John Maher, Publishers Weekly, staff pick
02/15/2017
This novel-in-verse by Rohrer, a National Poetry Series winner whose most recent title was Destroyer and Preserver (he is also collaborated with Wave editor in chief Joshua Beckman on multiple projects, including 2002's Nice Hat. Thanks) centers on an ineffectual publishing company employee who consumes words for a living, including the constant working-class, shut-up-and-do-it advice from his wife and father that repeats in his head. As this book begins, the protagonist is opening Confessions of the Truly High, "a Victorian-era verse autobiography." Later, he sneaks into a church to read The Others, a work roughly about ghosts, and later still he dips into L'Enchanteur, a French text about altered states, and so on. Essentially, Rohrer's newest is a book of narratives about narratives. A source of great confusion is the poet's decision to call this a novel-in-verse when in fact it seems more like prose hacked into arbitrary lines (a pitfall the poet James Wright warned against years ago), so unlike the late David Rakoff's skillfully forged poem-novel Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. VERDICT For ambitious poetry collections and established Rohrer fans.—Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH
