Originally from Wooster, Ohio, Ted Mathys has taught English in Hong Kong and worked for the U.S. State Department in Berlin. A 2005 National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellow, a finalist for the 2004 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition, and a semi-finalist for the 2004 Discovery / The Nation Poetry Prize, his poems have appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including Fence, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, and Verse. Mathys now lives and works in New York City.

About Forge:

"This is some first book! It opens with a haunting twist on the creation myth, and keeps on opening into big poems that are architecturally complex and socially attentive. Mathys has set them all in a languagescape of juxtapostion and refrain. These poems leap—sometimes dizzyingly—but they always land, and always on some new conneciton, lighting it up."
—Cole Swensen

"With a kind of ‘all over' technique Ted Mathys miraculously forges words onto the page in a kaleidoscopic voiceprint of the present zoom of daily life. This book hums and chortles, sparks and pops out of ‘the mouth of your gift horse held / open like a zero.'"
—Peter Gizzi

"Ted Mathys' Forge is a remarkably original first book, an ‘ecstatic ekphrastic,' as he calls it, made of lush and inventive language that has been arranged within a surprising structure. Readers might find that a far-fetched group of ancestors—for example, Agee, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Stevens—come to mind, but the world Mathys pictures is the strange kingdom of the present and the colors he uses are uniquely his own."
—Susan Stewart