You’re Called by the Same Sound by Alicia Wright

Description

Book Description

You’re Called by the Same Sound is a reckoning, a confrontation, and a visionary meditation that interleaves private grief with public lament. In this book, Alicia Wright dredges a family archive in response to histories of devastation in northwest Georgia and the American South. Her flinty lyrics inventory and seek to resist a legacy of despoliation, warning that history is a “murky churn” in which our collective reflection is crystal clear.

Praise

Alicia Wright’s poems, gorgeously layered and formally deft, call us to engage with the possibilities of meaning beyond imposed coherence. There’s a palpable gravity to each poem in You’re Called by the Same Sound, and each is its own eerie summons. I am rocked by the ways Wright’s “voice ethering” attunes us to the intimate realities of contingency, precarity, and dependence. In Wright’s debut, history is less a story than a threshold. – MARY SZYBIST

From deep knowledge of history and literature, Wright creates poetry that soars. To use her words, for which there are no substitutes, these poems conjure the “spectral” as they “channel” and “distill.” The subject matter of You’re Called by the Same Sound—eclogues, iron works, choral arrangements, and more—is ambitious and complex, but Wright resists showiness. Instead, she gracefully arranges material so that it coheres like the petals of a flower (to borrow, also, one of her poem’s beautiful images). It’s rare to read a debut that’s so sophisticated or encounter any collection that combines such substance, style, atmosphere, and true feeling. – ROSE McLARNEY

The intelligence that moves through these poems is like the force that electrifies and organizes a school of minnows: each poem motioned by its own charge of knowledge—historical, scientific, sexual, social. The subject of this book is the centripetal and ongoing catastrophe of American history; and so the poems here circle back again and again, differently, irradiated, to the primal American scene and to its wreckage, not to pleasure in the luxuries of guilt or despair but to do the work, as Wright says, of “thinning the veneer” until “that property—the hunted space—itself is free.” The poems in You’re Called By the Same Sound can be as merciless and mesmerizing as the historical eye Wright describes, which “pins me holding / for as long / as I can think.” – TIMMY STRAW

You’re Called By The Same Sound is a lyric upended—the language Alicia Wright troubles is the trouble of history we configure as separate from us. In this book, everywhere is at stake and distance is a commodity the poet refuses, interweaving local acts with the systemic and transcendent. You’re Called By The Same Sound moves with a shining steadiness, a rigor and grace to the world that it grammars. – C. T. SALAZAR

In You’re Called by the Same Sound, Alicia Wright thinks her way through the fact of the multiplicity of beauty—not primarily at its places of origin, as, say, a contemplation of the many beauties of the natural world, but at its places of perception. In what ways is it meaningful, these poems ask, that beauty is perceived differently by different people? How can a sense of beauty be foundational to ways of being human and thus at the root of thinking about morality? As Wright notes, “You generate your flower-thought and recollect your flood.” How ought the flower-thought and flood of the individual be important to everyone? Wright makes poems that are somehow both weighty and light and ask questions that are fundamental to both poetry and life. You’re Called by the Same Sound is, itself, a beautiful book. – SHANE McCRAE

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