December 2005. Recorded in Magdalena, NM

John Tritica is the co-founder, with Mary Rising Higgins, of L)Edge, a poetry circle now in its 22nd year in Albuquerque, NM. He is the translator of the Swedish poet Niklas Törnlund : All Things Measure Time (The Landlocked Press, 1992). His book How Rain Records Its Alphabet was published in 1998. Sound Remains will appear later this year from Chax Press. He teaches gifted youngsters at Wilson Middle School & engages in backyard farming & soirees.

John Tritica’s Sound Remains is as much a book of vision as hearing. Tritica register the emotions and motions of sound, taking a sounding, re-sounding, and tracking auditory adventure. He shows us fresh pathways via the word-routes and the root-words, particularly in the remarkable poem “All Matter Is Encounter,” which presents us with “sound that thinks, thought that resounds.” Tritica asserts that “the hum of the room improves me.” I leave Sound Remains similarly improved, and moved.?— Hank Lazer

“Morning rise quiet, Satie’s parade” is one line out of many that defines Tritica’s rhythmic voice in a small space. Satie was a quiet composer, but in this book, the poet activates an intensity of feeling that magnifies the daily views of nature, of family and friends. There is a robust physicality here and the sense of a mind taking in the worth of language to expand being. This is a golden book.?— Gene Frumkin

What we have in John Tritica’s poetry is a phenomenology of the everyday, where the barely perceptible world right in front of our eyes and pressing against our skin appears in astonishing beauty and clarity, not as we normally experience it but as the poem allows us to experience it—a constellation of brilliant images, the inner life and music of words, the rush of juxtapostion and mind-body-spirit satori fusion: “a matter of hearing what’s slight significant.” Desert bloom and pulse of the sea create the apparitional expanse against which Tritica plays his magic, his inverted depth of field where “The stillness is illusory / broom grass sifts the breeze.” “All Matter is Encounter,” Tritica proclaims in this poetic manifesto, and all encounter matters when we encounter it by way of the permission granted us in this book of wonder and ecstasy.?—George Hartley

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