Description: Poetry. Fiction. 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.
Brief description: Dennis Barone's work has appeared in the Chicago Review, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, and Quarter After Eight, among others. Barone has edited numerous collections and published several books of fiction, including Temple of the Rat and Echoes. In 1992 he held the Thomas Jefferson Chair, a distinguished lecturing award in the Netherlands. He currently teaches at St. Joseph's College in Connecticut. Quale Press has published many of his works: SOUND/HAMMER (2015), FIELD REPORT (2011), NORTH ARROW (2008), PRECISE MACHINE (2006), WALKING BACKWARDS (2002), and THE DISGUISE OF EVENTS (2002). He is also the author of THE WALLS OF CIRCUMSTANCE (Avec Books, 2004), PARALLEL LINES (Shearsman Books, 2011), AMERICA/TRATTABILI (Bordighera Press, 2011), and ON THE BUS: SELECTED STORIES (BlazeVOX [books], 2011), and co-editor of ESSAYS ON ITALIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE (Bordighera Press, 2012).