About Matt Mason
After earning his MA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis, he, of course, moved to Omaha where Mason lives with his wonderful wife Sarah and baby daughter Sophia. He edits PoetryMenu.com, a listing of every Nebraska poetry event (and, yes, there are a lot, see for yourself) and founded Morpo Press which, since 1997, has published 25 chapbooks by up-and-coming local writers.
Over 100 magazines and anthologies have published his poems, including Laurel Review, Prairie Schooner, The Morpo Review, and the online edition of Mississippi Review. New Michigan Press released his chapbook Mistranslating Neruda in 2003; not to be outdone, Lone Willow Press put out When The Bough Breaks in 2005.
Mason has read poetry everywhere from behind the podiums of the Nebraska Book Festival to the stages of the National Poetry Slam as well as at universities, high schools, libraries, book stores, radio shows, state fairs, art museums, bars, ice cream parlors, and coffee shops across the country, even appearing as the stand-in for Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and Oscar winning director Alexander Payne at rehearsals for the opening of a performing arts center. He was appointed an Admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska by Governor Mike Johanns in 2004, enjoy donuts, and sometimes do write about cows. He has more information available at MidVerse.com.
About Things We Don't Know We Don't Know
"The only thing better than reading these poems is to hear Matt Mason himself read them."
--Marjorie Saiser, author of Bones of a Very Fine Hand
"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, author of So Often The Pitcher Goes to Water Before It Breaks
"Although Mason takes his title from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's nonclarification of U.S. policy regarding "the 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 morethings we only think we may be better off not knowing."
--David Clewell, author of Now We're Getting Somewhere and The Low End of Higher Things
