Dear Everyone - Tapa blanda

Part lyric, part procedural, Dear Everyone troubles the lines between the public and private self while illuminating the porous borders between ourselves and others. Written out of and for an enormity of voices, this collection of poems adopts very “unpoetic” elements—lists, litanies, indexes—in a sustained effort to sensualize and critique our transient natures, our knowledges, our ways of performing power. These pieces work against forms of beauty that anesthetize or privilege the composed self of the lyric speaker—that which can be data-mined, profiled, targeted for advertisement—in order to encounter an unauthorized language framed by clashing experiences, from which the self grows. Playful, meditative, unexpected, & hypnotic, Dear Everyone acknowledges our false intimacies and fears even as it urgently fights to discover new ways for us to connect. 

Matt Shears is the author of 10,000 Wallpapers (Brooklyn Arts Press 2011) and Where a road had been (BlazeVox 2010). He was a Schaefer Fellow at the University of Nevada Las-Vegas, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has taught most recently at California College of the Arts in Oakland and San Francisco, and at the San Francisco Art Institute. He lives in Berkeley, California with his family.