Soundings

Soundings is Dora Malechs latest anthology of poems written in the last decade and appearing for the first time in a single volume. It includes works from her previously published books, Shore Ordered Ocean, Say So, and Stet. About Shore Ordered Ocean: By turns playful and serious, the poems in Dora Malechs Shore Ordered Ocean revel in the inherent tensions and pleasures of sense, sound and syntax, reveal the resonance in the offhand utterance, seek the unexpected in aphorism and clich, and tap into the paradoxical freedom of formality. This is an extraordinary collection of highly idiosyncratic poems which explores place, politics, the body, love, art, and more. It is bound together by an urgent, physical and beguiling relationship with language itself. About Say So: The poems in Say So are at once rigorously formal and wildly experimental. Human utterancebe it prayer or plea or pun or turn of phrase or epithetis one of Say Sos primary pistons; poetic traditionrhyme, meter, form, rhetoricis another; the beauty and betrayals of the body, or bodiesechoed in the beauty and betrayal of language itselfis a third. Together, these forces provide the pressure that makes Say So move and brings these poems to life. About Stet: In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the bodys bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language.