Things We Don't Know We Don't Know

“Matt Mason must be declared the Poet Laureate of the Midwest! No other native son celebrates the overlooked America, its unsung citizens (from the anonymous poets to the part-time English teachers), and its expansive indigenous landscape as well as he does. Mason’s poetry is humorous when he wants to be quirky, heartbreaking when he wants to be eloquent, and though he moves effortlessly into other moods and geographies, he always returns to his first and most enduring love (and to what he knows best)—his homeland.”—Rigoberto González, director of the National Book Critics Circle
 
“The only thing better than reading these poems is to hear Matt Mason himself read them.”—Marjorie Saiser
 
“Although Mason takes his title from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s nonclarification of U.S. policy regarding ‘war on terror,’ this exuberant poet helps us to see clearly a cornucopia of things we too often forget we know. Whether turning his attention to kiwifruit, Wild Kingdom’s Marlin Perkins, the Strategic Air Command Museum, or lovers who with luck may come to resemble a no-expiration-date snack cake, Mason sheds some of his Nebraskan light on our universally human proceedings. And anyone who can actually say, for the poem-record, ‘I believe that aliens built the Pyramids, Stonehenge,/and most of my ex-girlfriends’ surely knows, by heart, a few more things we only think we may be better off not knowing.”—David Clewell