Judith Vollmer’s sixth collection explores human voices and geographies, stories and mysteries, and natural phenomena inside urban spaces. Her lyrical narratives, character portraits, locational investigations, and choral fragments often emerge from physical objects and from green and/or ruined cityscapes. Vollmer’s home city, Pittsburgh, and its sister-locations within Italy and Poland, undergird her attention to orientation and perception at work in her poems’ acutely visual studies.
Featuring twenty-one new and fifty-seven selected poems from her earlier volumes—
The Apollonia Poems,
The Water Books,
Reactor,
The Door Open to the Fire, and
Level Green—
The Sound Boat reveals Vollmer’s devotion to examining place and space to uncover poetry that touches emotions related to wandering physical and emotional realms: some familial and deeply personal, some unknowable.
Old city, I’ve come East for your long day and endless night:
down in the street, between the turtle fountain and the iron head
the party shouts and sings, sweats and snakes, swells into a throb
or momentum of sound.
—Excerpt from “The Sound Boat”
