Impotent is a collection of moving stories about a time when "it is easier to get a refill on a prescription than approval for therapy" and individuals are reduced to letters on a medical chart. In revealing vignettes, Matthew Roberson clinically catalogs the hopes, dreams, and failures of people identified only through form-like abbreviations (C— for co-dependent, I— for Insured). In these "case studies," Roberson captures his subjects' lives poignantly by supplementing their diagnoses with unconventional footnotes, lists, and medicinal warnings. Each vignette exposes a different facet of our medicated society, humanizing a multitude of conditions: depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, impotence, and dementia. In a world of domestic ennui, deadpan voices struggle to transcend numbness while simultaneously trying to manage the pain of living. Impotent is both important social commentary and engrossing fiction.
Matthew Roberson’s Impotent contains sharp, energetic writing, as well as cleverly structured narratives that keep a strong hold on the reader’s interest. The book reaches, too, for a larger message: We’ve become a society that relies on pharmaceuticals, and our culture has become so commercial that we look to products to solve our problems, instead of ourselves.'
—Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
As the fictions in Impotent accumulate, the book graphically decays, morphs, becomes ruined in front of your eyes. Matthew Roberson’s work is, in a way, a rewriting of Frankenstein but Impotent is the monster itself—-patched up, stitched, sewn together. A hybrid. A mash-up. The book reanimated. Sublime. And ‘it’s alive!’ ’
—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and The Blue Guide to Indiana
Matthew Roberson is the author of 1998.6 (FC2). He teaches at Central Michigan University and lives with his wife and children in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.
