reviewed on July 14, 2026

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Former impresario of KGB Bar’s Monday Night Poetry Series, Matthew Yeager returns in his second collection to the New York City of his twenties, when he worked double-time as an adjunct instructor at Columbia and as a bar captain in the city’s upscale catering industry.  The poems in Rocket Surgery were drafted during that time—the late 2000s—and have been reworked over the past fifteen years or so into a memory-cycle as nostalgic for the city as it is traumatized by the class and cultural indignities to which its non-wealthy residents are subject.

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Across the book’s six monostich long-poems, Yeager sketches a series of objects and characters around which, like Stevens’s jar in Tennessee, the city organizes itself: a yellow balloon tied to the bandana of an ubiquitous East Village street artist, a Florida orange in all its citrine glory, a lover’s ankle-length sock, a spray-painted dance path that appears overnight in lower Manhattan.  These and other totems structure in their patterning the otherwise meditative and meandering long-poems in Rocket Surgery, a sort of poppier, working-class Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror mixed with the wildness of the Forklift, Ohio School.  As in the former, Yeager’s poems depend for their success on the muscularity of the mind in action, engaged in efforts of observation and intellect that might hold a reader’s attention across—at least in the ARC that I saw—the book’s 156 pages.  Of the ankle-length sock, for instance, Yeager observes that it is “meant to go / unseen with low-cut sneakers and cleats” but its “failure to do so produces a thin, socially-acceptable white line along the ankle.”

 

When Yeager loses this keenness of insight, when the thinking goes slack, the poems become tedious, possessed of a Tristram Shandy silliness:

 

Every other day, it seemed, I’d handle

tiny socks, look at one, register it, drop it.

I had underwear I never wore.  Shirts too.

Pants, well, I rarely wash pants.  I spot clean.

 

Like Sterne, Yeager tends toward the digressive, to the point that Rocket Surgery is chock-full of locutions like “Well anyway” and “But then I’m off course, fantasizing again…”.  For Yeager, that tactic seems to function as a poet’s deliberate—even arch—deferral of plot, a kind of aesthetic refusal, but the effect on readers can be as frustrating as an addled uncle. 

 

Yeager is best when he rises to the heights of his own intellect, in particular as he pursues an argumentative thread or delineates the contours of character-sketch psychology.  In the book’s strongest poem, a monologue in the voice of Anna Nicole Smith, he channels Bidart’s Ellen West and Vaslav Nijinsky—as well as Masters’s denizens of Spoon River—in evoking the desperation of a late-in-life search for meaning:

 

                                  Even the teenage boys are old;

            they must be pushing thirty now,

            with receding hairlines,

            milk-eyed dogs, mortgages, two-car garages.

            Do they ever blow the dust off thoughts of me?

            Can they climb back into outgrown fantasies?

            I used to think of them, up late

            in their little darks, gulping, diddling their little peckers,

            one me each in their million boy-minds.

 

Here, Yeager achieves that intensity of interiority so important, he argues later, in the poetics of someone like Rilke.  “He’s telling this kid,” Yeager explains of Letters to a Young Poet, “over and over to be inward, to grow inwardly.”

 

That advice seems as out-of-fashion now as the mode in which Yeager delivers it, a mock epic of New York’s catering community that functions at the same time as a literary reckoning with Rilke, Wordsworth, and others.  In a poetry industry characterized to a large degree by outward preening—who can dress like a poet?  who can not-capitalize or spell their name like a poet?—the cultivation of “interiority” must seem far more agonizing in the hunt for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship than the tactical curation of "content."

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Yeager has eschewed such self-promotion, holding these poems in silence and darkness over the past decade and a half, at a moment when both literary egoism and academic promotion demand constant visibility, constant loudness.

 

Rocket Surgery is a thoughtful, often riveting engagement with the effects of place on character.  It is also, then—in the sense of the term as a virtue itself unfashionable—a study in and example of character.