Sum Ledger

In Sum Ledger's historical portraits, ekphrastic sonnets, and closely observed lyrics, Adam Tavel's signature fine-grained details and near hallucinatory clarity, no matter his subject, achieve far more than a kind of painterly attention to subject, something more ambitious and necessary. Tavel is showing us the America we have been and now are with this unspoken but omnipresent principle: to look very closely at the faces of the dead and the living, indeed to touch them, lightly, but not to hold them at arm's length. To do so is only posturing, not compassion. Whether conjuring patients in a consumptive ward or writing about his son's guitar while contemplating colonialism's claim on so many young lives, Tavel portrays the complexity and avarice of a country's past and present with a sure command of language, evoking the lyric's great strength in keeping open the barriers between realms of experience.