Printed Matter Vancouver is proud to present Consistently East, the debut volume of poetry by Camas, WA native Matthew Eiford-Schroeder.

Order your copy of Consistently East today!

Advance Praise for Consistently East

“If art is animated by the shock of the new, Matthew Eiford-Schroeder has presented the reader with a top grade set of jumper cables. Consistently East is a startlingly good and often brilliant book of poems, one that makes harmony of its surface contrasts. Radical and clear in its language, cosmopolitan and Northwest homegrown in its intellectual sensibility, powerful in the way it interrogates the modern nature of power, it is a book that exemplifies the best verities of American travel literature by taking a hammer to the clichés of the genre at its worst. Reaching to both Whitman and Milosz, Consistently East is a book of the first rank that deserves to be read by as many people as possible.” Robert Lashley, Stranger Genius Award Nominee and author of The Homeboy Songs and Up South.

“Traveling roads in between two stages of apocalypse, here is a friend’s diary written on a hostel wall. Through poetry, we relax into the same curiosity and fear of the wanderer, his flashbacks becoming ours. Love, insight, and invitation command this collection. And the revelation that our memoir is safest in the hands of a madman.” – Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Heaven is All Goodbyes (City Lights), winner of the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry.

About Consistently East

“What is adventure in the time of Google Maps? If hardship is what separates an adventure from a vacation, how does one reconcile the ease of travel with the challenges one faces?” Matthew Eiford-Schroeder wrote the poems in Consistently East as he emerged from the fog of a brain injury he suffered as a result of a violent attack. Join the poet on his global travels from Brooklyn, New York to London, across Mongolia via a charity rally, then on to Seoul, Korea. After returning to the West Coast of the United States to visit his family, Matthew attempted to work the oil fields of North Dakota before finally returning to Brooklyn, where he was assaulted. “I wrote these poems when the world stopped shaking enough for me to collect and organize words again. I had to rebuild myself, take an inventory of memories, then create. To begin to live in a world that had changed in a self that was no longer the same, but both not completely severed from the trauma and beauty of the past.”

About the Author

Matthew Eiford-Schroeder was raised in Camas, Washington, where he spent a sizable portion of his time working and playing on his grandparents’ cattle farm. He moved around America, working retail and lifting heavy things, before eventually landing in New York, where he snuck into an art school and became a bouncer.  He currently lives in Bellingham, where he is studying political science at Western Washington University.

Please join Printed Matter Vancouver co-founders Christopher Luna and Toni Partington and the Vancouver poetry community on August 9, 2018 when we celebrate the release of Consistently East at Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic.