House of Sound

"I can't remember where I heard it but I heard someone say, when referring to the music of Miles Davis, that he played the 'sound of jazz.' When I read Matthew Dadonna's book of poems, House of Sound, I have to say, "The poetry of Matthew Daddona is the sound of poetry." It is. Daddona's poems are sonically and visually brilliant. I mean brilliant, twofold. One, they light up the world. Two, they exist in a domain of magical surprise. There are the little moments of lyrical beacons like, "The roof is aflutter./Michael calls/Starlings, Darlings," and then there are the large heart monasteries like, "I know this: sound can make/a heart break like glass/and that there are two sounds/for every/one heart." That is what this book is, a heart monastery, and each poem has a least two sounds for its one big heart. Within the sound of his poems there is a silence, and in this silence, there is a world of image and light, big light, that sweeps across the landscape of human experience and implores you to listen. When you read House of Sound, listen aflutter. Read these poems to yourself. Read them out loud to yourself and then quietly to your beloved. Be beloved with these poems so you can be beloved with the world."
­-Matthew Lippman, author of Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful

"'It takes a lot to say I love you, I mean it / and mean it,' says the speaker in Matthew Daddona's rich and impactful debut, House of Sound. These poems articulate not just love as an act, but also absence, longing, and philosophies, all as a measure of life and its relevance. To stay or to go? This is the central question that haunts the speaker. And when one goes, is one ever really gone? These poems ring with questions: 'I want their wings. I want their answer.' In sound, memory, and the lack thereof. In life, love, and the lack thereof. This collection is an exciting example of language as meditation, mediation, and conciliation, as well as action. To write, to love, to understand, to contemplate-these are all verbs that require action and attention. Attend to the quiet yearning in these poems. 'Because a shadow / wants to leave you / but doesn't know how,' attend to the way these beautiful poems move through the body as heartsong, as a form of human touch."
-Chelsea Dingman, author of Through a Small Ghost and Thawrs, right in the story and world the speaker brings us into. The anxieties over existing, personal bonds and relationships, and existential dread are all too familiar, and comfort us as we try to find ourselves nudging from darkness into light, from isolation to kinship."-Joanna C. Valente, author of Marys of the Sea and editor of Yes, Poetry