In Toy Gun, Matt Coonan fires his offbeat childhood and adolescence at the page. He enters each exit wound with sharp diction and form, extracting shards of trauma, mental health, and evolutionary violence. What you’ll find in this collection is ambitious anaphora—an attempt to explain the irrationality of an obsessive mind by imitation. The result of it all? Raw candor dripped on the backdrop of New York suburbia; an intimacy that lingers from backyard barbeques to funeral homes.
You do not want to miss this searing debut.
“Toy Gun is the whistle you hear—shrill, strange, beautiful—right before the grenade hits.”
“Irony is a very welcoming and easy trap for a poet, and reading Toy Gun I was taken by how many times Matt avoids the pull to simply score some ironic point —the sometimes shallow, unearned gaze of the speaker towards some easy irritation—by giving the poem an unexpected but welcomed and refreshing turn.”