Listening in Many Publics

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Listening in Many Publics comprises three long poems on the subject of sound, and of sound's listening subjects: a crown of sonnets, a serial poem in 40 parts operating through fracture and dissonance, and a narrative journey to an underworld where words decay into aurality. Signifying both sound and air, aurality describes that which we can attune ourselves to hear and the medium through which these vibrations travel: both what and how. Plural, civic, and political, the poems locate themselves in the many publics that constitute our individual and social being, interrogating that which brings the subject into existence. Thinking along with the theory and poetics of Aimé Césaire, adrienne marie brown, Frantz Fanon, Fredric Jameson, and Diane di Prima, the poems create an open, hopeful sensibility in the face of the structures and systems they critique. For readers who love Bernadette Mayer and the New York School of poetry, David Berman, field recordings, tape hiss, and Brian Eno.