Intentional Room

  



INTENTIONAL ROOM

by Esther Mathieu

* Winner of the 2024 International 3-Day Poetry Chapbook Contest

Intentional Room is a lyrical journey into the interior. The shape of language becomes an architecture of detailed description to claim place in the moving reality. It is an indirect love story. A restless meditation. Beyond the mere telling of plot, Esther Mathieu reaches into layers and nuances of her surroundings. There is creative authority in this round-about love story. From “a calendar whose upper pages grow roses” to “what love but love of green for water,” Mathieu sings a song in a different frequency. The definition of love, the definition of language, are a conjecture of the poet. Intentional Room is a litany in which Mathieu allows change into her scripted place. The story takes place inside a mind, inside a memory, and inside a defined space. It is a contemplation of order making landscape serve as a revelation of the interior where description is “itself an entire action.” “I am certain / of labyrinth, I am certain of suspension— ”

Diane Glancy, author of Quadrille and Piece