If objects could talk, what sort of things would they say?
Through a rapid series of short poems Raymond Luczak, author of seven acclaimed poetry collections such as Mute (A Midsummer Night’s Press) and The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips (Squares & Rebels), imagines the inner lives of inanimate objects. We learn what it’s like to be a dressing room mirror, a bobby pin, a discarded mattress, a stapler, a credit card, a hearing aid, and a bagful of marbles among other things.
Reviews
“A Babble of Objects imagines complex inner lives for the items that surround us daily, from thumbtack to tile grout, mattress coils to brick walls. When we meet a washing machine–a ‘blocky cow’ chewing its cud–and learn its gripes and joys, we can’t help but consider the desires and emotional limitations that animate our own. One of the chief pleasures of this collection is its whimsical layout and lineation; each poem is itself an object for contemplation reflecting its subject’s way of moving in the world. Read this book as a study in paying attention, and the spaces around you will become at once more intimate and strange.”
— Emily Van Kley, author of The Cold and The Rust
“We’ve all had that moment, whether it’s because we’re moving apartments, or rearranging the living room, or cleaning out the closet, when we make the call to say goodbye to something material, something as simple as a set of sheets or a lamp that hasn’t held a bulb in years. For a brief second, we see a memory. An afternoon of passion on those sheets. Late nights working on a manuscript beneath the lamp’s gentle light. It’s almost as if these pieces of plastic and metal and chemical are alive … but what if they are? In Raymond Luczak’s A Babble of Objects, not only do they have voice, but they have stories, and in poems both craft-strong and playful, Luczak channels everything from high heels to washing machines, giving the everyday items with which we share space a spectacular life of their own. After reading this book, you’ll understand that poetry is everywhere, and you’ll never look at, well, anything, the same way again.”
— Bryan Borland, author of Tourist