The Sound Boat

Judith Vollmers sixth collection explores human voices and geographies, stories and mysteries, and natural phenomena inside urban spaces. Her lyrical narratives, character portraits, locational investigations, and choral fragments often emerge from physical objects and from green and/or ruined cityscapes. Vollmers home city, Pittsburgh, and its sister-locations within Italy and Poland, undergird her attention to orientation and perception at work in her poems acutely visual studies. Featuring twenty-one new and fifty-seven selected poems from her earlier volumesThe Apollonia Poems, The Water Books, Reactor, The Door Open to the Fire, and Level GreenThe Sound Boat reveals Vollmers devotion to examining place and space to uncover poetry that touches emotions related to wandering physical and emotional realms: some familial and deeply personal, some unknowable. Old city, Ive come East for your long day and endless night: down in the street, between the turtle fountain and the iron head the party shouts and sings, sweats and snakes, swells into a throb or momentum of sound. Excerpt from The Sound Boat