Sunday with the Sound Turned Off

The through line of Sunday with the Sound Turned Off is Werblin's voice that wavers not in its navigation of wavering states - of mind, location, and heart. Personal pronouns are not just protagonists here; they are also vehicles, allowing us to get from 'I tell you these songs go only so far' to 'you can majesty your ice-age excuses' to 'his human capacity for rain.' Finally, it is a lyrical relation to the self in the world, and the self with other selves, that this book allows us to enter and to hold. -- Barbara Cully, author of Under the Hours, Desire Reclining, and The New Intimacy

This second book by Andrea Werblin is filled with wry, savvy poems embodying cautiously accepted psychic discoveries (“your better synaptic self”) that gesture toward careful self-unmaskings. “So much music was misunderstood,” the speaker muses in the first version of the title poem, like the youthful self-delusions to which we all must wise up - their “Lyric exhausted, impermeable to sun.”

The lullaby for one fist of Werblin’s first book is muted here, but the speaker tells herself to accept what is, to “swear / it is nothing personal.” Although these current days of rest have the sound turned off, she knows she must “rehearse, rehearse” her human perseverance.