Passing Tones by Ben Gunsberg

In Passing Tones, Ben Gunsberg’s new collection of poems, we listen for the in-between—the notes that move us with grace from one major chord to the next. We are carried back to poetry’s musical roots, as Gunsberg calls upon the lost avatars of blues and folk, country and rock and strikes up all the musical instruments poetry can muster. But music, like life, is ephemeral, and so we stand with the “weight of knowledge / coiled in our rough hands,” and see the way “loss unwinds loss,” and yet, still, we are “making a record, tending the good mix / for those at risk, [for] anyone who trembles.” We know like Whitman that there’s “Nothing left to do but shed your skin and blast / a mighty yawp.”  With Gunsberg as our maestro, in a world where we might have been silenced, we keep singing.

–Michael Sowder

In a world made half of noise—an omnipresence of disorganized sound—Ben Gunsberg‘s Passing Tones finds and lifts and makes audible the music and the song: compositions that insist at an almost molecular level, as in “Cell Song,” where the lines and stanzas make a tune out of what separates, divides, and multiplies. Or in a sideways series of homages and blues, elegies and covers—Muddy Waters and Merle Haggard and Roy Orbison and Ray Manzarek, not just name-checked, but fully living in the rhythms and sonic architecture of this gorgeous set list you’ll want to listen to—read, sing—again and again.

–Lisa Bickmore, Utah State Poet Laureate