How to Grow Blurry, by Nathan Metz

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Nathan Metz’s debut chapbook How to Grow Blurry incorporates ekphrasis, the lyrical essay structure, and various other established and invented forms to explore the distance between the name of a thing and the touch of a thing. The poems survey aspects of visual art (including paintings by Mark Rothko), touch, history, religion, memory, story-telling, and family, seeking intersections, divergences, and parallel lines. Thus, How to Grow Blurry turns memory into “nothing but touch / and repeated touch”, history into “layers of projections of past touches touching” and language into layered and scrapable paint.  

Nathan Metz (he/his) is a writer and teacher from California. His work has been featured in Autofocus, Phantom Kangaroo, The Racket, Moon City Review, the Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere. A 3-time Shipsey Poetry Prize winner, Pushcart nominee, and Best New Poets nominee, his writing and translations have been supported by the Elk River Writers Workshop, Canterbury Program, and the Community of Writers. He is a Master of Fine Arts - Creative Writing candidate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.