The poems\/prose pieces in SoundMachine<\/i> are largely concerned with writing and parenting, and as a result I think I liked this book a bit less than I liked the other book of Zucker’s that I’ve read (The Pedestrians<\/i>). But there’s still a lot of interesting stuff in SoundMachine<\/i>, even if I find it less personally relatable. Writing and parenting, as Zucker talks about them, share a concern with\/anxiety about attention: paying attention or not, what things we pay attention to or don’t, how we pay attention or don’t, speaking vs. listening, communicating or failing to communicate. I like how other books find their way into this book: Zucker talks about reading Laura Ingalls Wilder aloud to her kids, and about reading Tommy Pico to herself; she talks about To Kill a Mockingbird<\/i> and the work of other poets. And there are pleasing phrases throughout: “The cars on Amsterdam Avenue are long waves of sound” (3). “What I like is the long, underwater glide as I push off from the wall” (34), “I watch the ride go on & on knowing it will stop” (48). “There’s a now<\/i> to write into, a continuous present that the act of writing stretches across a canvas so to speak” (252). I mostly like the longer pieces best: the first piece, “Song of the Dark Room”, about a child who can’t sleep, is one of my favorites, as is the last piece, “Residency.” I find the diaristic nature of these and pieces like “Seven Beds Six Cities Eight Weeks” satisfying; I like how they incorporate so many everyday moments alongside the larger themes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The poems\/prose pieces in SoundMachine are largely concerned with writing and parenting, and as a result I think I liked this book a bit less than I liked the other book of Zucker’s that I’ve read (The Pedestrians). But there’s still a lot of interesting stuff in SoundMachine, even if I find it less personally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}