The Songs that Objects Would Sing

Roxi Power's The Songs That Objects Would Sing is a poetic meditation on transience through the lens of objects people leave behind. C.S. Giscombe writes, "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.'" Power's elegies and ecopoems reconstruct new linguistic meeting grounds for ancestors, where impermanence elicits both grief and joy. Through call and response improvisations, Power invokes Miles Davis' "Saeta," Patti Smith's "strange music," and the impossibility of Cage's silence, as counterbalances to forgetting: "frottage rubbed back into likeness enough to help us see what is no longer there."