Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? - Tapa dura

Poetry. "'The devil is in the details' is not a phrase that I feel I fully understood until I read Noah Eli Gordon's clever book, IS THAT THE SOUND OF A PIANO COMING FROM SEVERAL HOUSES DOWN? The problem is, as Gordon might write, that the devil, while enjoying his/her residence among the details, has no necessary relationship to them. Injection of a strange, vivid consciousness into the bureaucratic nihilism of our times is just one of the achievements of this subtle, unflinching collection. I recommend reading it for the elegant patterns and power-washed prose, as well as for its extremely useful descriptions of the fine line between paradox and hypocrisy."--Lucy Ives

"It's like Noah Eli Gordon brings an abacus to calculus class. To seminary. To couples therapy. To band practice. What is it for? His tabulations, his many rearrangements of the beads, sound like solving. I love their deliberateness, undeceived about how absolute the quandary continues to be."--Brian Blanchfield

Noah Eli Gordon is the author of several books, including IS THAT THE SOUND OF A PIANO COMING FROM SEVERAL HOUSES DOWN? (Solid Objects, 2018), THE WORD KINGDOM IN THE WORD KINGDOM (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series and subsequently chosen for the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award. He teaches in the MFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he currently directs Subito Press.