The verses in Abby Luby‘s Humming Beneath the Mist emerge from her long relationship with music—the roundness of vowels, the slithery consonants—hear it in the “crack slap rip of Velcro, his sweet palms stolen.” As much as the alphabet of letters resound, the syllables build into phrases and stanzas, tactile, tastable, and at times, unapologetically sexy. Here are eulogies that double as odes, and much that simmers under the text, bringing double pleasures, hints of loss and darker tragedies, lived love, lovers and goodbyes, and sensuous love-notes to life.
–D M Gordon, author of Nightly, At the Institute of the Possible and Loosestrife for Porcupines.
The twenty-one poems in Abby Luby’s Humming Beneath the Mist shape a poetic biography of a woman’s life. What differentiates them are phrases infused with a jazzy musical language that become the speaker’s unique voice and identity. The reader of these poems is treated to a palpable visitation to points present and past, a full emotional register, where curious images and situations lead to earnest questions, lead to the synthesis of realizations and revelations that astound and lure.
Oh can’t you feel the rush of seams splitting at the cusp of the moment ?
–Carla Carlson, author of Love and Oranges
In the poem, 17 I.R.R., Paul Klee, Abby Luby writes “evaporated streamers/exit yanked to a blank beyond.” In this exceptional debut poetry collection, Humming Beneath the Mist, words set themselves up in elsewheres – war, birth, the bedroom, the body, and art, with specific attention paid to music. “Do you know how/the blues soothe the back of my eyelids. “
The book is a meaningful tribute to being alive.
–Vanessa H. Smith, author of Room Tone