Acoustic Shadows

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Ceridwen Hall's debut full-length collection brings "charming geekiness" to poems of family and communication ."Acoustic shadows are areas where the typical movement of soundwaves is disrupted--by wind, by walls, by tidal currents or fluctuations in ocean temperature--such that sounds become muted or warped. On land, they enable noise to refract around an intervening silence, conjuring ghostly echoes. For a submarine in dangerous waters, an acoustic shadow might be a treacherous blind spot or an ideal hiding place." This explanation of the title that opens Ceridwen Hall's first full-length poetry collection also reveals her program, for indeed this is a book full of disruptions and ghostly echoes, navigating the dangerous waters of "a future / where houses outlive parents" and we must contemplate how it is "awful now to expect / to live another half-century or more in this world / all our need is destroying." Real submarines ply these pages, along with Marconi and all manner of fascinating technical details, but as the title of one poem ("My Sisters Are Cold War Submarines") makes clear, her real subject here is family, itself a treacherous sea to sail. In the end what she seeks, and finds, is that ideal hiding place, "a safe distance from which to love everyone.