Eating Death
Eating Death
Matt Mitchell's poetry collection "Vampire Burrito"
Vampire Burrito by Matt Mitchell. Grieveland, 2023.
This generous, vast-hearted collection treats the real like the disastrous sadness that it is. Everything is named. The name that eats naming. Poem that eats poeming. Poems the interlinked shadows of a life lived as an intersex person. Inter the utterance of interest—the moving between that triggers flood upon flood of imageries, imaginings: between and among sexes, yes, and significantly, but too between place, between families, between father and child, between youth and maturation, between identities, between inter and trans, between betweens, between, shall we say it, this life and the next, this and all other possibilities of personhood. As much as Mitchell revels in exploring the passages from and to (eye to subject / subject to perception), the inter I am left clutching is its other sense: to lay a body to rest, to perform over a self the ritual rites of passing. One leaves Vampire Burrito with the sense that Mitchell has died death upon death, has died deaths between deaths, and these poems, these visually and musically abundant stories-within-stories, are the bits of undeniable life that have risen from the poet’s internment.