House of Sound

It takes a lot to say I love you I mean it / and mean it says the speaker in Matthew Daddonas rich and impactful debut House of Sound. These poems articulate not just love as an act but also absence longing and philosophies all as a measure of life and its relevance. To stay or to go? This is the central question that haunts the speaker. And when one goes is one ever really gone? These poems ring with questions: I want their wings. I want their answer. In sound memory and the lack thereof. In life love-and the lack thereof. This collection is an exciting example of language as meditation mediation and conciliation as well as action. To write to love to understand to contemplate-these are all verbs that require action and attention. Attend to the quiet yearning in these poems. Because a shadow / wants to leave you / but doesnt know how attend to the way these beautiful poems move through the body as heartsong as a form of human touch.-Chelsea Dingman author of Through a Small Ghost and ThawAcademy of American Poets prize-winning poet Matthew Daddonas debut collection House of Sound is a rumination on domesticity and modern-living a playful and earnest attempt to discover truth within silence and hope within noise. In these twenty-eight poems Daddona combines narrative and lyricism to recreate a home-and thus a mode of living-that delivers to us a family searching for contact amid societys cacophony. In Poem for Leaving a narrator attempts to put together a former friends reason for deserting him for a more alluring country while in Tourist Trap a husband reckons with trying to protect his wife from verbal and physical assault while pondering the language of violence and appeasement. As the roles of mother father sister brother daughter son are often exchanged borrowed interplayed the collection externalizes their choices by showing the narrator take flight from his hometown in the conclusive Poem for Returning. Celebrating language and ultimately the liberty of choice Daddona writes To become love / dress in idiom.House of Sound is a dynamic and dexterous debut from a bold new writer a commentary upon the joys and defeats of trying to live most beautifully.