Beginner's Guide to a Head-On Collision: A Memoir in Poems

By Sebastian Matthews

The award-winning author of In My Father’s Footsteps combines prose and poetry in a poignant memoir that captures the aftershocks of a tragic car accident.

“Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision offers the deeply moving poetic memoir of Sebastian Matthews’s life in the years after the car accident that devastated him and his wife and son. The poems, which often read like electric improvised prayer-songs, intimately evoke the terrors and wonders of catastrophic physical injury and of ‘life re-booted.’ They are disturbing, eerie poems that embody the paradoxes of being The Dead Man at the crossing. They are amazingly honest in their hopeful, mystical sense of fate. In this unforgettable book, the reader is present at the scene of the accident where the hovering spirit that has departed the body addresses the living person re-entering his brokenness and answering for his transcendent awareness.” —Kevin McIlvoy, author of Hyssop
 
“These poems detail both physical and spiritual misery, and though suffering can turn us into many things, Matthews—our banged-up storyteller, singer, docent—strives to deliver himself back to a body of affection, intimacy, and kindness. Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision is a remarkable record of that difficult journey.” —Patrick Rosal, author of Brooklyn Antediluvian
 
“By reading Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision we learn how to go in and out of the body as necessary and, in order to take in the possibility of a larger life, how to wrest from breakage release from our thin views of who we are.” —Vievee Francis, author of Forest Primeval

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781597095693

Sebastian Matthews

Sebastian Matthews is the author of a memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps, and two books of poetry, We Generous and Miracle Day. His hybrid collection of poetry and prose, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, won the Independent Publisher Book Awards' silver medal. Matthews is also the author of The Life & Times of American Crow, a “collage novel in eleven chapbooks.” His work has appeared in or on, among other places, the Atlantic, Blackbird, the Common, Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, the Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Writer’s Almanac. Matthews lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Learn more at sebastianmatthews.com. 

Book preview

You’re driving up into the mountains for a weekend getaway when a sedan veers into your lane. Your car is moving approximately fifty miles per hour. So is the other automobile, which is being driven by a man in the throes of a heart attack. (The police report will say the man was dead before impact.) The sedan crosses the centerline and crashes directly into you. You shout out in surprise an instant before you’re hit.

Open your eyes. Close them. Open them. The windshield is spread out on your lap in a blanket of chipped ice. Smoke oozing from car engines. Your partner is slumped in the front seat beside you, eyes shut tight. You can’t tell if she is breathing. You look back at your eight-year-old boy, seated in the back behind his mother: eyes wide open, he has been brought to silence by the shock. You look back just as your wife draws a large