Published by Monitor, publication date 21 May 2026
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In 1990, a girl moves to the USA. She goes to school, learns English, becomes an American citizen, and aspires to become a writer. But what is she to make of the extravagance, bombast, and damage she encounters in the new country’s language and customs? And what about the shrink-wrapped hunks of frozen meat, hurricanes, and the cat-eye marbles scattered on the road?
Hugely pleasurable, in turns funny and dolorous, Talk a Blue Streak examines how the act of writing declares a selfhood, but one that is always performative, looped, and curlicued.
‘What do you get the wow of? What kind of beauty compels you to speak? How do we learn to notice it to one another? Lila Matsumoto roves across “a movie set called America” in search of wonder, finding it not in sunsets, monuments or institutions, but in supermarkets, house shows, video games and especially the crystalline fly-tipping suspended beneath a frozen pond – bootlegged, cut-price, bulk-bought, ultra-processed, ultra-perfect. She pursues “things before they harden into emblems”, before they hang together in the usual ways. Talk a Blue Streak is about girlhood, friendship and becoming yourself between registers and alongside someone else.’ — Jennifer Hodgson
‘Talk A Blue Streak: a perfect vision of writing as mise-en-scène, where sites or stages or snapshots both synthetic and synthesising keep us asking – what is “real life”? In her continual shifts and rearrangements of objects that also keep time, Matsumoto’s intense focus on the particularity of the world of things makes her one our great contemporary not-so-still life artists.’ — Lucy Mercer
‘Reading these poems and stories feels like studying one’s reflection by the smears in a mirror or the hoar on a frozen lake; we can’t see ourselves or comprehend our lives by looking directly, but by recollecting the weird trajectories of our effects, our wayward sequences. Reading the poems made me feel like I was having the best, funniest, most profound conversation with a friend, the two of us suspended in a dewdrop-kitchen as the world-party goes on around us. It made me feel like I love my funny friend, that this moment talking together is the distillation of all I could ask of life.’ — Nisha Ramayya
‘Talk A Blue Streak is a captivating collection of prose poetry that pulses with vivid imagery and raw emotion. With lyrical precision, Lila Matsumoto captures fleeting moments and deep reflections, inviting readers into a world where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. A thought-provoking, soul-stirring read making the familiar feel new and the fleeting moments of life linger long after the final word.’ — Peter Gizzi
‘Talk a Blue Streak is a deep rummage through Lila Matsumoto’s memory box of acquired US cultural observation. Lila’s elliptical, humorous text takes the uncanny and absurd virtue of a sun-faded, plastic, alien culture and spreads it out on the yard-sale rug for all to see.’’ — Graham Lambkin
‘Talk a Blue Streak’s speakers are beset by other people’s language, sat in it, “in the thrall” of it. Living is a stream of audio interruptions writing cannot soothe; living, writing – swap those terms around. But even if we’re subjected to administered language’s “gawky big marbles” in the mouth, or struggling to reproduce the conditions for life, we can still look to objects – a sweet-pea’s “unfurled earlobe pink”, “glommed” windshield bugs – and, coursing beneath artifice, there’s a “shambolic and candied jamboree” constantly streaming from the headphones anyway: in Lila Matsumoto’s poems it’s this road-tripping DIY “jangly lo-fi insurgency” that I love the most.’ — Tom Betteridge