Matthew Guenette grew up in the Connecticut River Valley in Newport, New Hampshire. He received a BA in English from the University of New Hampshire, and an MFA from Southern Illinois University. He has worked as a busboy, landscaper, and salesclerk. He lives with his wife Julie in Madison, WI, and teaches at Madison Area Technical College.

Books by Matthew Guenette: Sudden Anthem

Other poems on the web by Matthew Guenette:
"Future Poem"
Three poems
"Playing Poker with the Gods"
"Nickname Letter"

Matthew Guenette's Blog.

About Sudden Anthem:

"There is a splendid intercourse between the dream and the conscious life in Matthew Guenette’s poetry, a constant mental eventfulness that never rests, never surrenders to the old, dried up poeticisms or the stereotypes. A Guenette poem feels ongoing, flung, a creation in the absolute keep of the imagination, a moving revelation where nothing is forbidden or held too precious. Like every good funny poet, Matthew Guenette is to be taken seriously because he is deeply sane, a writer who cleanses us of pretetention and restores our wonder. Sudden Anthem is a brilliantly inventive debut."
—Rodney Jones

"Sudden Anthem is a raucous, boisterous, song of praise. Matthew Guenette’s outrageous poems romp across the page then make a beeline for your gut, your heart, and your intellect. Guenette is both a nimble purveyor of pop culture and a singer of the most intimate of songs. Sudden Anthem is a deliriously witty collection."
—Denise Duhamel

"Sudden Anthem is sudden in only the ways that volcanoes are. Which is to say, they’re seismic, a long time coming. The poems erupt with strangeness, dislocation, desire. They groove. They’re molten and barbed and funny. It would be tempting to think they were telegrams from an alien planet. And they are, in a way, if the planet is our own, strange even to us, its captive audience. Bring on the apocalypse, I say. Matt Guenette knows the way."
—Paul Guest

"I know of no irreverence as steadfastly ethical and political as Guenette’s, no sense of the ridiculous so heightened and acute that it becomes a sense of the sublime, and of no other poet in whom the volubly playful-”You/cannot fold Christina Aguilera in half more than 7 times”-is so twinned by the deadly serious. His speaker is a comedian and a philosopher, a kind of stand-up humanist, a superhero in a red, white, and blue jock-strap who will redeem us from the shoddy, inevitable, and completely humorless machineries of death.
—Josh Bell