Poetry

Collections

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

Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018)

‘The world within Urn & Drum is a cornucopia of shapes, colours, and objects, fashioned almost as a gleeful, surreal picture-book; a playful naivety that leads to serious questions of what it means to exist and feel in the world. Through linguistic dexterity and play, [these poems] exclaim heartbreak and test the limits of language in a single line.’ —Rachael Allen

‘In exquisite rituals of embodied and object orientated writing, Lila Matsumoto’s breath-taking new collection of poetry combines lightness of expression with a thrilling complexity of thought and emotion. There is joy and jouissance in this collection in abundance.’ —Colin Herd

‘In Lila Matsumoto’s poems, a hyperintense focus on things felt and seen leads not to description, but to a parallel intensity of focused and patterned sound. From self-help muesli to grief bacon, these word-incursions of “unspeakable / loss + bliss” are worth a thousand pictures; alternate soundtracks for imaginary films.’ —Peter Manson

Pamphlets

Your dangerous shoe (Oo Press, 2024)

Foggy Eyes (Earthbound Press, 2022)

Light Hazzles (Essence Press, 2022)

Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2016)

Allegories from my kitchen (Sad Press, 2015)

Poems online

the saws and hammers’ in Suddhashar (2024)

Sampler in Mercurius (2021)

from ‘ricochet’, Fortnightly Review (2021)

‘new food’, with Food People, Counterflows zine (2021)

‘Eye Bread’, Erotoplasty (2018) [link downloads pdf]

‘By Likeness’, MAP magazine (2017)

‘Checklist’, with Samantha Walton, Tripwire (2016) [link downloads pdf] 

‘I saw her know’, a)glimpse of) (2015)

‘inclined plane’, Datableed (2015)

‘Strawflower’, with Adam Butcher, Datableed (2015)

Anthologies

‘Wieners’, Happy Birthday? (2023)

‘Locust Clamp’, Kruk Book: An Anthology for Frances Kruk (Materials, 2022)

‘A toppled valise emanated waves’, ‘All of the pans in the kitchen’, ‘The dog wanted to go one way’, The Weird Folds: Everyday Poems from the Anthropocene (Dostoyevsky wannabe, 2020)

‘Radio’, A Plume Annual vol.2 (Museums Press, 2019)

‘Also delicious’, ‘Right of way’, ‘Trombone’, ‘Geronimo’s House’ (Poetry London Issue 94, Autumn 2019)

‘Evening fast out the window’, Murmur Anthology 1 (Monitor Books, 2019)

‘Alphabet’, Appendix in Monsoon Melody by Thao Nguyen Phan (Mousse, 2019)

‘Aubade’, The Evergreen: A New Season in the North (2019)

windows regarden what is outside’, Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press, 2018)

‘always pleasing this quarter sun’ in In Transit: Poems of Travel (Emma Press, 2018) 

‘Or new’, The World Speaking Back (Boiler House Press, 2018)