A Thousand Doors
Pushcart Prize Nominee (2011)
In his first poetry collection, Matt Pasca explores how personal suffering can be transformed into grace, as if through alchemy, when that grief can be shared with others. Using the Buddhist “Mustard Seed" parable as scaffolding, Pasca’s work pays homage to Kisa Gotami’s quest to save her son by finding a home where, impossibly, no suffering has befallen the inhabitants. Pasca’s poems maneuver deftly between the seemingly simple and mundane details of the world around us and the sublime world we often miss in the myopia of our pain. Just as Gotami comes to see her grief reflected in the eyes behind the doors upon which she desperately knocks, we too find our own sorrows and pleasures illumined by Pasca’s unflinching exploration and delicate crafting. In the end, these poems testify to the necessity of sharing ourselves with courage and vulnerability, and how doing so can lead us further down the path of joy.
A THOUSAND DOORS is fully a book of love. That is, the poet finds--inside the alphabet, between the sheaves of experience, of hard childhoods, of war and violence, inside myth and story--a moment, a gesture of love. Thus his poems surprise us, find their way into our own loving, long after the book is put down. But these are not just poems of feeling--they have texture and depth--and empathy. — VERONICA GOLOS, 2011 New Mexico Book Award Winner for Poetry
A fine collection of poems. I have been delighted again and again. The book's music is omnipresent and Pasca has a wonderful sense of line. But most important, there is wisdom aplenty... This is why we turn to poetry, to see ourselves. And Pasca has argued mightily for us. — KENNETH A. MCCLANE, W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature, Cornell University