Panoramic narratives made from imaginary forms, daily commutes, circuits of walks—invitations to a new sense of memory and scale.
From “Matson”:
So what patent reason is there to doubt
the color of a person’s hair, there is sun
and timpani. Rubber wood bone silk
hemp or ivory I will cut my own in June
but in May endured the next yesterday
I’ve already now forgotten what all the
men I’ll ever know smelled like. Maybe
devotion on the beach in the middle of
the week which is dumbed down with
planets imagining song.
Reviews
“Amanda Nadelberg’s poetry resembles a city where all kinds of things are happening at once, some of them funny and others pretty scary. The quasi-epic ‘Matson’ takes the form of a swarm. Suddenly words, thousands of them, have accrued to this particular subject; no one knows why. Its mass is almost frightening but good to be with. Songs from a Mountain is a dizzying achievement that rings out loud and precise and clear.”—John Ashbery
“I used to think of Amanda Nadelberg as basically a narrative poet. She invents characters and tells stories about them. A more discerning reader might have noticed the restless, playful spirit of linguistic experiment that is the most obvious feature of the surface of her poems, but in previous outings this energy was in harness to the tale she was telling.
Maybe she’s still a narrative poet. But in Songs from a Mountain, rhetoric runs wild. Narratives are condensed into small unities–epithets, comparisons, puns–held together by the lowly comma splice in lines of no more than two margins but sometimes as many as four caesural pauses. To characterize the complexity, richness, and surprise of this poetry, it would be appropriate to invoke Crane’s ‘logic of metaphor,’ and that should give you a sense of how rare a mixture this is.
Done well? Yes, please. Given a choice, I prefer to see something done well rather than poorly, and this volume skillfully does a kind of work that most of us have forgotten how to do. Well done, Nadelberg.”—Aaron Kunin
Praise for Amanda Nadelberg
“Amanda Nadelberg’s poems . . . are jumping, funny, romantic, and frequently lyrical….which in the immediate reading is almost pure music.”—Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly