Bodies Turning Into Sound
Poems by G. K. Allum
What is the cost of falling in love again? Bodies Turning Into Sound follows a long marriage through its fracture, and through whatever comes after: grief, a house full of children, and the stubborn possibility of starting over. The poems ask what has to be buried or forgiven first. And what do we leave behind to survive?
Same house, same person, another season
Bodies Turning Into Sound is about what a marriage does over a long stretch of time, which is drift, and fracture, and sometimes come back. It moves from England to New York in 2001 to the Pacific Northwest, where a man is raising two children in a house that never stops needing paint.
Along the way there's a stepfather called My Derek, who ran a marathon a little faster every time he told the story and was afraid, at the end, of dying. A neighbor falls in the shower. A woodpecker's tongue loops around its skull while a father keeps telling his small children to mind their heads. Some of it is funny and some of it isn't and a few poems are both, and the titles give a fair amount away: “We Peck Like Vultures at the Bony Remains of Each Other,” “If I Follow You Into the Water Will My Lungs Collapse,” “Upon Learning David Hockney Passed Away.” Cellos keep turning up, and horsehair, and the long repeating fifths of the sea.
Under all of it is a question Allum can't leave alone: whether anything is braver, or harder, than choosing to fall in love with the same person again, and what has to be forgiven, buried, or found before that's possible. The poems don't settle it. They keep walking into the next room, the next season, the shore at night where a pod of whales surfaces and the bodies turn into sound.
Content note: these poems deal with death and dying, depression, suicide, and the strain of a long marriage.
- TitleBodies Turning Into Sound
- AuthorG. K. Allum
- GenrePoetry
- PublisherInk & Ribbon Press
- PublicationPlanned for 2028
- FormatPaperback, limited edition
- ISBNTBA
- PriceTBA
Arranged like a jazz progression.
The poems fall into three braided movements, named for the II–V–I, the progression that sets out, pulls tight, and comes home. Three short Domestic Matins poems open the book and fall between the movements.
The setting out
Trains into London, New York in 2001, a first home, and the habits we inherit from the people who raised us.
The tension
Children arrive, the paint never dries, and the poems get restless. Most of the marriage's hard weather is here.
The return
Morning light on a kitchen table, a neighbor's last days, and a stretch of shore at night.
Prizes and shortlists.
G. K. Allum
Still being made.
The manuscript is in its final revisions. Follow The Inkwell, the press's Substack, for sample poems, the publication date, and word of pre-orders as the book takes shape.