The Louder the Room the Darker the Screen

It’s an engaging mix that introduces one of the more profoundly original poets of California in his full-length book. His poetic starts where others come to a dumb conclusion, to guarantee that no structure of language or song escapes interrogation.

I like to think of the “Screen” in Paul Ebenkamp’s extrordinary The Louder the Room the Darker the Screen as both the surface upon which word-pictures are projected and the mesh through which we gaze out onto the field of noisy empiricism, “fused to the present / but not to its tense.” These agile, inquisitive and singular poems shine the  spectrum on every surface, gathering form and form’s feeling with “all ears / to the obdurate halcyon.”