View-Master Land - by Matt Bialer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The long poem VIEW-MASTER LAND is about the poet's struggle to come to terms with the loss of his wife Lenora and the profound changes to his life that her death has brought. It's also about celebrating companionship and hope with his new love, Mary. It's about how technology like the BlackBerry, which seemed so wondrous when it was first introduced, is now defunct, a relic of the past. It's about the act of seeing, and how that evolves and gains depth as we get older. Bialer shares his memories of the View-Master toy he grew up with and how magical it was to view his favorite childhood TV shows in three dimensions on a special-format stereoscope and corresponding "reels," which are thin cardboard disks. There was even an attempt to bring the View-Master back in cutting-edge VR technology, but that too failed, underscoring its obsolescence. VIEW-MASTER LAND is about how our perception is enhanced as we go through life, and how the most ordinary can become extraordinary.

Review Quotes

The View-Master was this old gadget that allowed you to see iconic landscapes that had been printed on Kodachrome paper. You slipped that strip of photographs into a slot of those oversized glasses and were transported. Still-life virtual reality. Matt Bialer's new epic poem View-Master Land is a walking and beautiful reality. The poem will break your heart and make you want to love the people in the world that you know, and the one's you don't know you might love, even more. This a love poem to seeing, to how we see, to loss, and new beginnings. It is a love poem to New York and to the wife he lost to cancer, Lenora, and to his new love, Mary. It is a poem about watching the connections, seeing the threads, between a 'bygone era' and the current reality. It is a poem that allows us to be in the past and the present at the same time. Through a glorious cadence and generosity of imagistic spirit, Matt Bialer's View-Master Land will take your hand and your body and walk with you through Central Park on a cold and breezy winter day, every once in a while, nudging you, saying, Look. Look. Look.

-Matthew Lippman, author of Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful

Soaked in nostalgia for technology that no longer reliably functions, Bialer shows us ourselves through these lost gadgets. But it's not all melancholy; love, like life, will find a way. In this long poem, he deftly steps between grief, architecture, potato and leek soup, and hope. And if you ever had a View-Master, the last image of this remarkable poem will give you chills.

-Matthew Rohrer -author of THE SKY CONTAINS THE PLANS