<DIV><p>"'It's only America,' writes Matthew Pennock. 'We watch it unravel like a fourth act without direction.' And so in Pennock's fine first collection, we find a country of war and surveillance, an economy of boom and collapse and a consciousness built of fragments assembled, admired, broken again. <I>Sudden Dog</I> is a troubling, moving and memorable book, that returns?strangely and via estrangement?to love."?Mark Wunderlich</p><p>Honest and vulnerable, <I>Sudden Dog</I>'s speaker ardently engages the self as drunken romantic, or<I> even </I>as domesticated animal in the loud realm of the real. We follow Matthew Pennock because he convinces us of his singular and lyrical voice, because he shows us how to be reckless yet stoic, dignified yet sardonic, quick to joke yet on the verge of tears.</p></DIV>