ADAM TAVEL’S NEW BOOK, SUM LEDGER, OUT NOW WITH MEASURE PRESS

Past OSR contributor has a powerful, urgent, and meditative new book out with Measure Press. Praise below.

Adam Tavel’s Sum Ledger is about money, its ludicrous power, and what it is like not to have access to it. It begins with a kid rolling pennies to buy diapers for his twin baby sisters and moves into a virtuosic ode to trailer parks, which gets at the exuberant sadness, the heroic lyricism, of places where real poetry is born. Nuance is brought to the collection as Tavel opens the frame and takes excursions into the recent and distant historical past, from child labor to 9/11 to Nero. He builds toward a tour de force of a final movement that delves into the source of all of it — including the torment of the current moment — via ekphrasis, history, and myth.Sum Ledger is a book about work, so much work. The work of trying to make it all work. Indeed, Tavel has worked these poems themselves to a fine sheen. There is meter, there are sonnets, up against the noir intensity of images. Sum Ledger is urgent, and it is masterful.

 — Diane Seuss

Adam Tavel weaves a spiderweb of frost on the windows of a rectory station wagon. His poems are sacred and sometimes profane. They swagger with journey and the story of a life that could be spelled out in capital letters. There is restoration to a sense of being. Here is a master of images that cut across poems. 

 — Diane Glancy

Buy the book here, at Measure Press