Matthew Lorenz -- Matt to friends, siblings, cousins, colleagues and customers -- assembled his Poems and Echoes in the early 2020s from creative writings spanning four decades.

"I won't presume it a literary journey," Lorenz says now. "It's a personal and interpersonal one: reflections, experiences, emotional and spiritual life stages. Not all history, not all imagined, just a record to mull. Books communicate across time, distance, alienation."  

This book opens with The Twilight Fleeting, a second-person narrative couching grand criticism, "the most I can possibly say about literature. Writing for no one about lit's overwhelming force during my college senior spring freed me for the more mundane papers that let me graduate from Swarthmore on time -- and, if you read a bit too seriously, let me live on."

From there, P & E alternates 16-poem sections (Coming of Age and Awareness; Maturity; Decline; Benediction) with four corresponding stories set in young adulthood (The Courtship), parenthood (Happy Childhood), elder or displaced adulthood (Last Rites), and final transitions (The Silver Key Club).     

Lorenz wrote the last four stories during 18 years as a newspaper sports and copy editor, designer and occasional reporter, feature writer and opinion writer, mostly with the St. Petersburg Times.

The poetry encompasses a longer period, including local readings, publications, community-access TV and the 1993 "Poem for Petrograd" exchange with St. Petersburg, Russia. The late 2000s and 2010s also proved poetic -- after Matt's four years directing publications for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, after mattmedia of Florida's founding, and amid two decades of corporate sales and marketing on both sides of Tampa Bay.

Matt Lorenz and wife Celia live in Largo, Fla. He has two children, two grandchildren, three stepchildren, nine step-grandchildren, and four step-great-grandchildren.