Listen

Listen (MadHat Press, 2020). Lucid, smart portrayals of the “darker corners” of despair through scores of illuminating juxtapositions. Experimenting with many verse forms to give shape to the mind’s restless shifts and associations—sometimes absurdly funny, bracingly honest, and always sharp in thought and craft—the lyric testimony of Listen reaffirms the indispensable, if fragile, consolations of art.

Steven Cramer’s Clangings was a tough act to follow, but its dive into mental disturbance by way of a persona has permitted, in Listen, a movement into the darker corners of the poet’s own psyche. A very agile mind inhabits these poems, which are enhanced by exciting leaps from image to image and reference to reference, as well as by unexpected quotations, allusions, etymologies, bits of history, and asides that inform and delight. Like Cramer’s previous book, Listen will reward reading after reading.

—Martha Collins

Excerpt from Clangings

I hear the dinner plates gossip Mom collected to a hundred. My friends say get on board, but I’m not bored. Dad’s a nap

lying by the fire. That’s why when radios broadcast news, news broadcast from radios gives air to my kinship, Dickey,

who says he’d go dead if ever I discovered him to them. I took care, then, the last time bedrooms banged, to tape over

the outlets, swipe the prints off DVDs, weep up the tea stains where once was coffee. Not one seep from him since.

What, you wander, do I mean? Except for slinging my songs wayward home, how do things in people go? is what I mean.

from Clangings by Steven Cramer (Sarabande Books)