I have a very dear friend who has, since we began as teenagers listening to music together, drifted to what I consider the outer reaches of music: free jazz, the sort that’s, to me anyway, pure sound, almost entirely structureless, wild to the point of being a bit scary, at least to me. We were in New York together seeing a show in some tiny place on the lower east side, and between sets I tried to explain that I didn’t quite get it, to which he responded: "You’ve got to let it wash over you." It’s one of those things that sounds wonderful and, with the right spirit (say, Newcastle-fortified), is something I may eventually pull off, though I didn’t that night.

Since that night, I’ve read Matthea Harvey’s latest offering, Sad Little Breathing Machine, and to my friend in Philadelphia, I say: I get it.

Matthea Harvey’s book is easily one of the most mercurial collections I’ve ever seen, though a structured mercury, a mercury in a very specific, understandable container. I don’t know how to make this review of this imminently fascinating book as appealing as it should be, so perhaps just some facts:

1. There are patterns within—six sections, each beginning with an introduction poem, each with at least one ’prose poem’, though the majority of poems are written in these magical couplets which, if I could, I’d just quote entirely, selling the book with the book itself, robbing Matthea Harvey of the money you need to give her through her publisher.

2. Six poems have what, to me, are absolutely cryptic messages or updates about Engine. What these mean are completely beyond me, but I’ve got that nervous intellectual’s trait of horribly fearing what doesn’t intuitively compute.

3. Matthea Harvey’s got another book, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, which is amazingly different from this one, and she also edits the poetry in American Letters and Commentary, a literary journal that should be damn near the top of your list to check out.

Okay, here’s a sample of the couplets that leave me spellbound and confused about how to describe: "From the parrot’s perch / the view is always Hello." "People woke to find watches / in their hair. It meant // we were missing something." "We agreed: if you ask a fellow how / he feels you hurt a fellow’s feelings."

I could keep doing that (see four para’s above), but you get the idea.

It’s tempting to read these poems as a person who can’t quite nail down stereograms (those pictures that are fuzzy that you’re supposed to lose focus to be able to see, memorably ridiculed in Mallrats) would describe stereograms: it’s just stuff, lumped together, and there’s no schooner in the picture no matter what. I will absolutely admit this collection took a concerted week of solid nightly reading to ’get’ it, and it’s one of the very last collections I’d go to for a quick poetic pick-me-up.

That said, the book is in and of itself an entire world, and it’s tempting to argue that there’s even a narrative in there (in reality, it doesn’t matter: the book’s so open, to me anyway, that it’s like the line about mountains and zen: whatever zen you find at the top of a mountain is a zen you brought with you). There are couplets that’ll literally have you gasping for air out of hilarity—a hilarity magnified a thousand-fold because it’s so extraordinarily quick, and because it comes in such amazing places.

James Tate blurbs on the back of the book, likening it to an amusement park, and I suppose that’s accurate. It seems, to me, more than that, though: it’s like a really amazing party with the craziest, nicest people in the world, and you’ve heard stories about everyone present, so you kind of have a footing re: what’s going on, and all you have to do is wander around the party, listening to snippets, and in the end it’s the whole collection of people and conversation and corn chips that’s worth it, not any person or story or word. You let it all wash over you.

- Weston Cutter