10,000 Wallpapers (Alter(N)Ations)

Matt Shears' new chapbook of poems, 10,000 Wallpapers, is a phenomenal hybrid that borrows from many genres and operates on many levels. It's fun, experimental, mythic, mealy-mouthed and unprotected. Sonically, it's flabbergasting, but never flabby. Thematically it's indefinable but refined, self-reflexive and aware but awkward as a first kiss, or a first kill. It operates almost as a misheard fable traveling from ice age to Ave C, a place where Masque meets Western, where the Renaissance slips into its finest Greek to watch a dreamy commedia dell'arte production. It's a place where heroes come unhinged, their singing severed from our fullest judgment by lost or destroyed pages, or who perhaps are being unsung themselves by a culture separating itself at its seams. In the end it's a joyride. Or an open letter to a mastodon from an endangered element. Or each of us, emptied on an open page like some beautiful thing.