Sound/Hammer
by Dennis Barone

ISBN: 978-1-935835-14-1
Perfect Bound, $16.00
Publication Date: February 2015
5 x 8 inches, 106 pages
POETRY/FICTION

Individuals: Order directly from Small Press Distribution,
1-800-869-7553 ; or Amazon.com.

Bookstores: Order through Small Press Distribution or Ingram.

Sound/Hammer resides at the interface of poetry and prose. The first half of the book, "Sound," yields poems that question, and explore, the division between poetry and prose. Some poems embark on narrative flights; others are insistent in letting music trump plot. "Hammer" lets prose do the work. Some stories unfold simple, and just happen. Other stories demand attention to their music, with a few stories evolving into a condition where the music is the story. Sound/Hammer tries to bring halves into a whole, to follow diverse yet unified thread, to knit rough seams together invisibly, to be targeted by exploding into multi-directional arrays, to opt for rubbing out the straight lines and shifting focus into the mind's eye.

From Sound/Hammer...

Memoir

The knees are the eyes of the legs.
By them I am never transfixed,

but rather transported to where
I want to go. They will never

return me to where I have been:
amorphous or amphibian.

At each turning point they have
never failed to turn: first from

cell to soul and then to something
I have yet to understand. My

knees seem to know what's
next, even in the dark


Pick a Man, Any

There's nothing wrong with a man wanting to own some tools. Can't find fault with that can you? There's nothing wrong with owning some tools and a box to put them in. Nope, only way to carry them is in a box and keep it shut. Give a kid a hammer and the whole world becomes a nail. Kids have a way of getting real crazy sometimes. I got a neighbor whose kid sawed his baby sister's leg off below the knee while she was sleeping. I haven't got any kids, but I take no chances. Keep my toolbox lid shut tight as a coffin's. Rather be carrying my tools myself than let some crazy kid get at them, and then me be carried like so much dead weight in a sealed box.

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