Matt Del Busto

Matt Del Busto is a poet from Indiana. He received his MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he was also a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Image, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He lives with his family in Lafayette and works at the Purdue OWL as a Professional Writing Specialist.

“Every being is harnessed to another and another and soon”: Harmonizing the Whole in Alessandra Lynch’s Wish Ave

Nearly two-thirds of the way through Wish Ave, I see the question I’d been wondering since the beginning: “Is there a real Wish Ave?” The response is as simple as it is delightful: “Sure. Between Payne Rd and 86th, west of Ditch.” As an Indiana native who grew up driving on and around 86 th […]

Cover image of Caroline New Harper's "A History of Half-Birds" set against a green-blue background

Learning “how / to make a house of our ruin”: A Review of Caroline Harper New’s A History of Half-Birds

Matt Del Busto

“What would any of us do / if freed?” So asks Caroline Harper New in her debut collection A History of Half-Birds, winner of the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. The poems here, both intimate and inquisitive, both personal and public, seethe with life in all its myriad forms: carob seeds “so consistently shaped

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By Matt Del Busto