Sonogram {soundwriting}

Sonogram {soundwriting} by Emily Barker is a structurally inventive collection in which lyric, score, setlist, dream record and field note braid into a poetics of voice under pressure. Written from the itineraries of touring and the aftermaths of fire, flood and political drift, these poems move between venues, coastlines and hospital rooms, tracing how sound carries memory, desire, and damage. Barker's technique is musically alert and structurally restless, shifting from compressed list poems and documentary fragments to ekphrastic and refractive pieces that treat composition as a way of thinking through time, fertility, loss and the fragile persistence of hope. Throughout, the book tests what it means to keep making songs in a world of unstable weather and unstable bodies, where rhythm becomes both witness and method.