Mouth

If it is possible to make a guitar amp for the soul, to hear what moon, river, barn, and paramour all desire of each other, Amorak Huey has done it in Mouth. Each line is electric, illuminating poems that extend their metaphors, believing to endure in language is to make love endure. Huey leverages, as all evocative poets do, the ways the body’s intuition is always two steps ahead of the mind’s reflexive need for order. With high fidelity to the philosopher’s discursive insight, the concert goer’s raw enthusiasm, and the naturalist’s tenderness, this collection sings us a bridge toward the chorus of our collective hearts. Truly, he reminds us how, ＂It’s the listening body / that’s fresh. We cannot hear / with the same ears twice.＂

-Steven Leyva, author of The Opposite of Cruelty