Stephen A. Allen was born and raised in Vermont and currently lives in Michigan. He has an MA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and degrees from Amherst College and the University of Notre Dame. His poetry has appeared most recently in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Modern Haiku, Northern New England Review, and Rattle.
PRAISE:
Difficult Music fulfills the promise of its title—providing a rich and resonant score that never strays into the easy or ornamental. Stephen A. Allen writes with the rigor of someone who knows that form isn’t a constraint, but a scaffolding to climb. These poems confront illness, family, and faith with a quiet precision that always feels authentic. Whether recalling “the stolen sleep of the righteous” or confessing, “I have no sense of rhythm, I have no room / to move,” Allen gives us poems as finely wrought as they are emotionally raw. This is a book for readers who still believe sound matters, that rhyme can become revelation, and that poetry can capture the full difficulty of being human.
–Timothy Green, editor of Rattle
This debut collection plays with the ear and lands on the heart. With deft musicality and mastery of form throughout its pages, Allen lays bridges from grief to possibility, obstacle to resilience. As the poet himself notes in “Easter Sunday, 2019”: “Such the mystery / of belief and doubt.”
–Lisa Hemminger, poet, professor emerita of English at University of San Diego
Difficult Music explores a lifelong quest for “orchestral highs”—in faith, in family and literary history, in a material body given to involuntary tics, and in the quotidian liminal: the everyday spaces where silence and sound most urgently coexist. But an even deeper “difficult music” lies in Stephen’s mature use of formal registers to elevate our oft-prosaic striving: no easy feat, yet deftly managed on these pages. Here lies a gift of a collection, in which the author shares a lifetime of holding forth between worlds of punctuated rhythms, and offers hard-won wisdom to the ready ear.
–M. L. Clark, poet, writer of speculative fiction and humanist essays
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