Poetry

Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype, 2021)

‘The irreverent slide from relatable to grotesque, profound attention to the fashioned oddment, the eclecticism of the acute instance. In her new collection, Lila Matsumoto – already perhaps the funniest experimental poet working on this island today – studies and (em)bosses folly and sincerity as an artist of attitudes. A tall glass of Two Twin Pipes Spout Water lubricates the poetic gullet and promotes the elastication of the brain; to be taken eight times daily.’ – Callie Gardner

‘Lila Matsumoto’s Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water recombines live action, memory-story, dream-frame and sheer supposing. Family and other animals are spiky details and memories are fleshy and ornate diction – ‘dulsen,’ ‘lingy,’ ‘ogeed’ – abides with dailiness words. ‘Eyebread’ showcases Matsumoto’s body-level synaesthesia, jamming poems with pictorial images of iconography and fungus and fetish. Her recurrent musics spice the line-feel: “Music is flesh juice, is a kind of two-scene milk,” and there’s “A drum high up on a telephone pole” thumping in energy with this lively and beautiful book.’ – Lisa Samuels

‘Each Lila Matsumoto poem is multidimensional with ‘hidden landscape[s]’ tucked under ‘dizzying folds’ of the vast and tiny. A daily ‘kindness’, a nourishing ‘EyeBread’. From ‘waves of inexplicable / energy’ to the mould of ‘an abducted mushroom’, this is a book of rich material textures, dream fermentations, elemental capers, strange encounters, crystalline garnishings and hyper-molecular brilliance — ‘[t]he world is / all here’. Lila’s poems recompose themselves before your every sense and leave you reeling in lyric amazement.’ — Maria Sledmere

‘A real quantum strangeness abounds in Lila Matsumoto’s poems – actual glimpses of the life’s fast-running plurality, all the sprouting impressions and perspectives, in misleadingly tidy sentences that unfold like intricate inventions. I thought suddenly of Diane Williams – the feel is similarly capacious, graceful, jocular, tricky. The world framed by these poems is almost unmanageably lush, incorrigible, shady and glittering, and lucky for you you’re watching it skate past the passenger window with a basket of gooseberries in your lap.’ – Sam Riviere