Andrew Joron’s The Sound Mirror offers poetry that is both cosmic and atomic, operating above and below the normative scale of human attention. As in chemical reactions, Joron’s sonic friction breaks the bonds between letters and anagrammatically reforms a new lyric. As readers, we find ourselves in a symbolic space of paradox and impossibility “where / X relaxes relation, where / X licks the elixir of / night's rhyme with light.”

“In The Sound Mirror, the human is no longer the galvanizing agent, thereby letting the writing convey other properties of existence. By means of verbal slippage, by means of sound as simultaneous mirroring, a curious neural capacity evolves in the reader of these poems, allowing an elemental contact with incandescent mystery.” —Will Alexander