Pretty, Rooster features original comics from Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man) and Micah Farritor (White Picket Fences & Night Trippers), with other visual stimulations by Max Xiantu. Jason Schneiderman, author of Striking Surface, writes: You don't read these poems as much as you tumble through them. The pleasures of sound and sense are so perfectly calibrated that each of these sonnets wants to be read at least twice. The sonnet was invented as a vehicle for self-examination, and Matthews takes that literally, driving each one like it had a manual transmission. His discoveries are simultaneously comforting and unsettling, love always inflecting life, and life always inflectiing love.
