Winter 2015
Issue 16
Enjoy online excerpts from Matthew Thorburn’s A Green River in Spring, winner of the 2014 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize.
“Matthew Thorburn invites us to inhabit his exquisitely drawn landscapes inspired by the Tang Dynasty poets. In this fully-realized world, people don’t just believe in magic, they experience it first hand: the Taoist who hitches a ride with a crane to get to heaven, the emperor who sips dew to prolong his life, the boy who falls down a well and emerges in Mongolia ‘whispering through his fever of the vast, star-clotted sky he swam beneath.’ These poems create a world very different than our own, and yet we recognize it as if we are remembering a dream.”
—Michael Simms