Description:
Love in the Age of Virtual Memory is a madcap romp through history, with a focus on the noises we encounter. These poems are always concerned with hearing - "We live / in a house of sound" - and we readers find ourselves at concerts and symphonies, as well as listening to the everyday din of our lives. The book opens with "A cold spleen moves," letting us know we are on our way to reading poems filled with incredible imagery and language escapades. We follow the poet into "the eye of the storm," meeting Beethoven and Bashō, Maria Callas and Marina Tsvetaeva, Kali and Isis, and traveling to Boston and Moscow, battlefields and a yellow writer's room, and Oregon and Washington. What emerges is a whirlwind of words and images that will leave readers both satiated and wanting more.
-Mary Christine DeLay, author, The Skeleton Holding Up the Sky, Did I Mention There's Gambling and Body Parts?, and Ordinary Days in Ordinary Places
The poems in Love in the Age of Virtual Memory by Laura D. Weeks are both witty and haunting as she assures the reader, "See, I have promises to break." Whatever the subject - the poet's father, the several poems about Beethoven, including the fate of a lock of his hair, or a tragedy like the bombing at the Boston marathon - the language is vivid and unexpected. "The city shudders, / shakes its phantom limbs." An original read all the way through.
-Penelope Scambly Schott, Oregon Book Award winner and author, On Dufur Hill