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    Roguelike
    Roguelike
    Roguelike
    Ebook80 pages40 minutes

    Roguelike

    By Mathew Henderson

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Mathew Henderson explores with remarkable insight the unique logics of video games and addiction in his much-anticipated sophomore poetry collection.

    Mathew Henderson’s Roguelike, the much-anticipated follow-up to his acclaimed 2012 debut The Lease, melds the unique online vocabulary, culture, and logic of video games with family and addiction narratives, specifically the poet’s relationship with his mother and her struggle with narcotics. The resulting poems are arresting and fresh, mining game mythology, fantasy, and family history, while exploring the rich connection between video gaming and notions of addiction, repetition, storytelling, and escapism.

    Though the poems are largely narrative, ultimately Roguelike is less about stories themselves than it is about the psychological and emotional forces that define how and why we make them — how we’re all moved to shape the disparate and seemingly unconnected events of our lives into something meaningful, to make sense of the past and the present through storytelling.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHouse of Anansi Press
    Release dateApr 7, 2020
    ISBN9781487007829
    Roguelike
    Author

    Mathew Henderson

    Mathew Henderson is a recent graduate of the University of Guelph's MFA program. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives in Toronto, writes about the prairies and teaches at Humber College. The Lease is his first book.

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      Book preview

      Roguelike - Mathew Henderson

      Also by Mathew Henderson

      The Lease

      Roguelike, poems by Mathew Henderson. Published by House of Anansi Press Inc

      Copyright © 2020 Mathew Henderson

      Published in Canada in 2020 and the USA in 2020 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

      www.houseofanansi.com

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Title: Roguelike / Mathew Henderson

      Names: Henderson, Mathew, 1985– author.

      Description: Poems.

      Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2019017238X | Canadiana (ebook) 20190172398 | ISBN 9781487007812 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487007829 (hardcover) |

      ISBN 9781487007829 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487009052 (Kindle)

      Classification: LCC PS8615.E525 R64 2020 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

      Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

      Logos: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council

      We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

      For Mary, who loves like no one else.

      early/game

      ***

      Fishing, February, 1993

      She worked a boat in Louisiana. 

      Let the shit that comes up in a handful

      of prawns dye the marriage from her

      hands, thatched her shoulders

      with muscle until her half-bare back

      blended her with the row of boys

      as they spat and bent and straightened. 

      But how far is that? Aren’t prawns

      just lobsters? Isn’t every boy me?

      Didn’t she remember when I found

      her hiding in my room? Could she

      not tell then that she’d never be like

      anything that could be so much like me?

      After the Arctic, April, 1993

      You played Donkey Kong Country from the top bunk

      in the girls’ room, as they watched from blankets

      below. But your mother saw only glaciers, and long

      after you fell asleep, she lay crossways on the bed,

      awake with an ear to your sisters, willing their breath

      to sync, bodies to fall into each other, into her,

      to prove that there is only one child for each of us,

      that an ocean poured into glasses remains a single thing.

      And even as their eyelids were about to flit as one,

      she saw you catching her awake, your face in the black

      television, her so near to tundra, ready to run again.

      Leaving Woolfe’s Corner

      The last to leave, she wiped prints from the walls,

      bleached your nosebleed from the sink. Left nothing

      of herself for them to read, no cells or skin to roll

      over slides and under scopes like little rodent bones.

      When she disappeared for good, you sat alone

      in the bungalow, put the absence on her restless nature,

      even as she rushed downriver, dragging her scent

      and broken wing, pulling the foxes from you.

      Had she told you everything, you would have said

      you had no fear of trench-coat men, but of how dark

      her room could be, how she was felt seeping past

      the hinges, how you’d piss outside to keep from near

      her door. You knew already how a house could pile

      upon your chest, could pin you sure as a railway spike.

      And She Wore the Great Coat of a Boar

      In those weeks before, Talos had cursed them

      with wilted skins, tusks that grew strange

      and long in their mouths. And still they fell on,

      unstoppable across the field, young mouths

      sewn against

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