The poems in The Matuschka Case represent the core of Fraser Sutherland's poetic preoccupations over several decades. They are enquiries into the nature of happiness, absent or present, deserved or undeserved. For Sutherland, happiness consists in the practice of art, and in often bafled attempts to understand the other. Rueful and sardonic, uncomfortable in his own white skin, he seeks the other in everything that is foreign and unfamiliar. In his ideal world, he would "drift into a bar / secretive and self-contained, my whole past / packed inside me like a bomb."

Fraser Sutherland is a much travelled Nova Scotian who now lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has published sixteen books, including poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction in Canada and the United States. His work has appeared worldwide in magazines and anthologies in print and online, and has been translated into French, Italian, Albanian, Serbian, and Farsi. Before he became a freelance writer and editor, Sutherland reported for The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Wall Street Journal. He was a founding editor of Northern Journey, a columnist for Quill & Quire, and the managing editor of Books in Canada. A reviewer for The Globe and Mail and other periodicals, Sutherland has written and edited for dictionaries in three countries, and may be the only Canadian writer who is also a lexicographer.

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