I discovered a new poet yesterday while browsing the available reading at Bluffton Coffee House. His name is Matthew Thorburn and his first book of poems is Subject to Change.

Here’s the first stanza of a poem I’m particularly fond of:

In Lansing

Black coffee, for starters, and sun
sneaking through a scribble
of cloud. Holidays over and still
in from out east: you and me,
Kay, and cold day-old light–
dishwater or thereabouts. And pale,
the sky through these trees, blue
that’s almost not blue; a bird’s egg
or as if colors were verbs–

I love how evocative this language is. It transports me completely to January in the Upper Midwest, and strangely enough that’s a place I like to be.