Museum of Disappearing Sounds

Exploratory and alive to the senses, The Museum of Disappearing Sounds creates new perspectives on language and the world in which it exists. The disappearing sounds of Zoë Skoulding’s new collection may be either in the rich sonic environments that the poems observe or in the resonance of words themselves, which exist in traces of speech and breath. Skoulding’s characteristically inventive approach to form emerges in a fractured sonnet sequence based on the coincidences of room numbers; repeated actions build haunting interior spaces that the reader is invited to enter, each poem becoming a room in which sound “bounces off four walls,” as memory accumulates in the subtle rhythms of everyday life. These poems can provoke states of eerie unease or of passion evoked with shimmering densities of verbal texture.