paper • 79 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-71-0
Emoticoncert maps intensities and absences across different bodies and scales. Broken up into musical “movements,” the book works as a concert of sensations associated with loss, nationalism, and the slippery boundary between human and animal. Moving across both real and dreamed terrains, Emoticoncert is a dislocated kind of traveling linked by a sonic landscape and a record of entanglements with subjects (countries, friends, strangers, insects, languages) present and gone.
from “7th Grade Science Lesson,” from Emoticoncert:
Ms. Weiss sticks her fist
inside a dead cow’s heart
and wears, for one brilliant minute,
a red boxing glove. Poor
heart, dumb on the table,
to teach us about form:
superior vena cava,
veins, valves, ventricles,
small, empty chambers
where blood once swarmed…
“In Henri Michaux’s Land of the Magicians the deepest wizardry is the sorcerer’s power to ‘remove the horizon.’ Suddenly we’re confronted with sheer experience, no prompts. Maya Pindyck’s Emoticoncert has that breathtaking immediacy: the volatile gist of narrative, without cues. A kinship novel is hidden in ‘so that what remained of her would not / come back to hurt him // he mourned alone at her temporary headstone // No One’s Daughter’; there’s a haunted millennial history in ‘such are the laws / hanging by a thread from the mountain.’ ‘Words crossed Out in Suicide Note,’ ‘Desert Light in Mitzpe Ramon’– these are dazzling poems, pared to the bone, but like the horizonless landscape, vast in their intimacy. Pindyck isn’t a miniaturist: she’s a gem cutter with huge themes. The concision, the cumulative force–these poems are musical in their fierceness: not akin to music, but music themselves.” — D. Nurkse
“In Emoticoncert, Maya Pindyck writes of the conflicting emotional soundtracks that play continuously in all our minds. These honest, sonically dazzling poems pursue the music of human emotion, of the expressions we are taught to hold back and which appear in every family photograph.” — Idra Novey