Little Sound

Reviews / Votes

"Gibbel's beautiful Little Sound leads us through the fields of heaven and hell: part elegy, part love song, part discourse on devotion entangled with its own codicils and apocrypha. How intimate a thing is history, where 'authorship is uncertain,' knowledge is collective, and the present emerges among unfathomable inheritances." -- Elizabeth Willis, author of "Liontaming in America" "Gibbel's debut book, LittleSound, probes the 'cloud of unknowing,' history, theory, quotidian beliefs, and language itself. From wry observation comes insight. But her insights are not a hammer. Here, insight is a windy gust that refuses to allow common expectations of women. The form is loose; words move over the pages like prairie wildflowers. But wildflowers are hardy and insistent. Ever waving. Little Sound resonates, explores what lies under what is in plain sight." -- Vievee Francis, author of "The Shared World" "Gibbel's keen ear for sonics combines with rhapsodic remixing in this symphonic debut. Little Sound is propulsive-I could not stop reading once its music entered my mind, its sounds unfurling like germinating wildflowers and prairie grasses across the left margin's earth-each line a sound 'coming round to start / over again,' brimming with the history of an organ, clovers (spray-painted and not), Dante, and death. Gibbel is equal parts historian, weaver, environmentalist, and maestro. In her hands, 'History keeps / giving birth / headfirst into the sound.' All her poems' echoes still reverse and restart in my mind." -- Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of "Root Fractures" "Across a series of long poems, Gibbel's voice imagines and allegorizes the idea of the auditory, revealing how sound itself, the underneath of language, is more prone to wandering and waywardness than words. The book unfolds as a series of landscapes with a keen artistry and plainspoken delicacy, enabling a new interpretation of the American poem of place. Little Sound is a listener's book, a study in how sound feels, and an imagination of the invisible space made possible, or at least hearable, by poetry." -- Katie Peterson, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "Fog and Smoke"