Kirjahaku

Reactor gives voice to beloved and ruined American landscapes through extended meditations of an urban mystical wanderer.

Traversing time, cities, and voices, The Apollonia Poems finds its central aesthetic in place: physical and locational, perceptual and imagined. Judith Vollmer's poet-wanderer explores the layered terrains of urban environments from Pittsburgh to the Mediterranean to the Carpathians. Employing narratives and lyrics, songs and reports, and a short verse-play in three voices, Vollmer's meditations are by turns elegiac and celebratory, colloquial and lyrical.

Judith Vollmer’s sixth collection explores human voices and geographies, stories and mysteries, and natural phenomena inside urban spaces. Her lyrical narratives, character portraits, locational investigations, and choral fragments often emerge from physical objects and from green and/or ruined cityscapes. Vollmer’s home city, Pittsburgh, and its sister-locations within Italy and Poland, undergird her attention to orientation and perception at work in her poems’ acutely visual studies. Featuring twenty-one new and fifty-seven selected poems from her earlier volumes—The Apollonia Poems, The Water Books, Reactor, The Door Open to the Fire, and Level Green—The Sound Boat reveals Vollmer’s devotion to examining place and space to uncover poetry that touches emotions related to wandering physical and emotional realms: some familial and deeply personal, some unknowable.Old city, I’ve come East for your long day and endless night: down in the street, between the turtle fountain and the iron head the party shouts and sings, sweats and snakes, swells into a throb or momentum of sound. —Excerpt from “The Sound Boat”

Judith Vollmer's The Water Books does a stunning job of blending natural images within an urbane setting. Whether it be Pittsburgh, a bus, a phone conversation Vollmer's attention to detail is unparalleled.