KRISTEN MATTISON, born in South Korea and raised in the United States, discovered her interest in poetry while studying Theatre Arts at SUNY Fredonia. She earned her degree in that field and an English minor emphasizing Creative Writing, with a particular focus on poetry. Under the mentorship of poet David Lunde, she honed her craft, and in 1997, she further developed her writing at the University of Iowa’s Undergraduate Writer’s Workshop. In addition to her work as a poet, Kris is also a screenplay editor and photographer, bringing a keen artistic eye to both visual and written storytelling.
Background by © Alexander Bronfer
Editor’s Introduction
Kristen Mattison writes from the margins of the clock, when the world sleeps and the self stirs, stripped of pretense. Her poems arrive in the hush of after-hours, lit by the soft flick of a bedside lamp or the quiet thunder of memory. Born in South Korea and raised in the United States, Mattison’s voice carries the tension of dislocation, of belonging negotiated through breath and line break.
There is no ornament here. Her language is unfiltered, immediate, precise. She doesn’t perform suffering, she inhabits it, names it, places it on the page like a bone set down on a windowsill. Her speakers move through depressive terrain, through mourning and memory, through insomnia and estrangement, but they do not flinch. In these poems, the world is not merely observed, it is endured.
What makes her work sing is not its despair but its intimacy. Mattison writes with the clarity of someone who has lived with silence long enough to recognize when it lies. She knows how to pace a line like a held breath, how to fracture a stanza the way grief fractures time.
This is poetry as nocturnal confession, as psychic timestamp. Each poem here offers a small, vital resistance: against numbness, against absence, against the erasure of voice. In Mattison’s hands, even heartbreak is deliberate. Even loneliness is a form of witness.
