Every Transmission is about the erosion of our mechanical relationships and the movement to natural forms – our attempts to escape the cycle only help to complete the circuits through which we flow. There are places we create and drive toward, where we rest. And in between is a sky full of electrical storms and ground filling with water and ex-life – the pushing up of faith and wonder for us to climb around on. This book is a non-linear narrative, a collection of moments in lyric that world-build, guided by inhabitable voices.
I trust Adam Deutsch’s humane music – the rhapsody in poems such as “The Percolator Ode,” the subtle lyricism of pieces such as “Plash” and “Yes.” In this book full of images and insights into one human’s day, full of fog and Hummers and ducks, municipal waste, five-day-old goats, public radio, spiders and copper sun – which is to say, full of the day’s wonder and trouble, and realization that “all its fire is now a part of my face.” Yes, I trust this voice, trust this daily heartbreak and strangeness of “deleting dead people from my address book,” trust the beauty that lives in these pages, real and shy – like the beauty one trusts often is – like that “bug that walks the wall of bent nails.” There is lyricism here, and grace.
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
Every Transmission calls attention to the sensual – and loose – grip that love has on us as we move through our days with joy, growing older but not cynical, observing how “one cloud that night looked like a baby duck.” With a wife who “loves him malleably,” Deutsch savors moments clustered around the fire of life. While “the hurricane razes the dead / cherry blossoms at the property line,” this debut teaches us how to be intimate with the world.
—Diana Marie Delgado, author of Tracing the Horse
Every Transmission is a book of revving engines, knives tearing at meat, fingers burned on the stove’s flame or caressing the curved handle of a percolator – this book is tactile. In Deutsch’s skilled hands, the daily work of fixing a car or cooking a salmon become holy acts: “The life that swam against the flow, / who was gutted with care, won’t burn.” These poems make you feel the machinery of this world: the complex relationship between humans, animals, and objects, and, in the best way, the music, the humor, and the energy that inheres in all of it. Every Transmission is a vividly rendered reminder to “Channel / some of that energy. The fuel that fills the tank / of your machine. You see in the frost now / this is about love.”
—James Lowell Brunton, Opera on TV
Adam Deutsch’s long awaited debut collection Every Transmission is a love letter to the world, a clear-eyed accounting that unsettles as it comforts, and comforts as it unsettles. The magic of Deutsch’s careful pacing is that even the most extreme events are returned to the realm of the familiar, while sights you may have seen a thousand times are imbued with a fresh charge. This is a book of interstitial spaces – parking lots, garages, bathrooms, highways, butcher shops – mapping out the circulatory system of human life. Deutsch finds the parts of the world where we think no one sees us, so that he can capture us in poems, before showing us back to ourselves, exactly as we are.
—Jason Schneiderman, author of Hold Me Tight
Adam Deutsch
is the author of a full-length collection, Every Transmission, from Fernwood Press. He has work recently in Poetry International, Thrush, Juked, AMP Magazine, Ping Pong, Alchemy, and Typo, and has a chapbook called Carry On (Elegies). He teaches in the English Department at Grossmont College and is the publisher of Cooper Dillon Books. He lives with his spouse and child in San Diego, California. AdamDeutsch.com
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