Sound/Chest begins with a find and a flood. In the basement of the University of Iowa library in 2008, Amish Trivedi discovered an old card catalog and was arrested by its remnant labels. Severed from the content they once organized, the paired words and numbers of the catalog have become the titles of poems that attempt to reanimate lost relationships of sense. The speaker of Sound/Chest feels their way around a disaster whose personal blur sometimes sharpens in a collective phrase, and then simple terms rise, like the storm water that filled the library basement later that summer, with displacing force.
Amish Trivedi
from 'FuturePanic,' new poems with notes by the author and the publisher
The universe, too,
is held together by the same gravity
that holds us together. The same abyss
swallows us all,
and our hate cannot command the sea —
we cannot beg it back,
deny it any longer. But we can fight on, stare