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

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