The Songs that Objects Would Sing by Roxi Power

The first line of Roxi Power’s incredible burst of poems lays down the law with one hand and sets things in motion with another—that is, she writes, as if to remark on the coming noise made by fire, death, love – “A roll of presence infiltrated by scratch and origin.”  What follows is her articulation of such holy noise with its “mess of fictions/ that startle us back to grace.”  And by the end of the book, we’re sitting “edgeward” by the river with the poet as she remarks, almost casually, on “wanting to feel what could swallow us.”  The many motions of this music, of these songs that objects would sing, will brush the reader with a difficult and worthy joy.

–C.S. Giscombe

“Who sits absorbed, inside sound’s centerless, edgeless surround?” Power asks, in the elegiac title poem for her mother, “The Songs that Objects Would Sing.” The poems in this book are a call-and-response with the “fragment-songs” of objects, of the landscapes of Wyoming and California redwoods (in a time of forest fires), and of her departed beloveds. With both musical and emotional intelligence, not to mention a linguistic virtuosity, Power conjures hope amid her sonic discoveries—while still bearing lucid witness to personal and community grief.

–Farnaz Fatemi

“There’s a ruin inside of everything,” we learn in Roxi Power’s The Songs That Objects Would Sing, “burning / in secret, singeing the edges of sound.”  The book is aflame, both with the literal wildfires ravaging the American West and with the slower smolder of personal grief.  Power’s response to loss and disaster is precisely song–a quirky, plangent song, an “improvisation with certain stationary / facts” shot through with humor and underpinned by a rippling ostinato of lyric power.  Her keen observations of the details of life lived amid fire–the “silk slips” of irises, a broken hummingbird letter-opener, a candle flame reflected in a piano’s deep finish–draw us intimately into “the mute acceptance of objects / to receive our fragment-song.”

 –Mark Scroggins