This Music From Another Room

Author: Eliot Cardinaux

Publisher: The Bodily Press (2024)

This Music From Another Room, the third and final installment of a chronological trio of books by Eliot Cardinaux (beginning with Quiet Labor and Toy Elegy) published by The Bodily Press in 2024, is an odyssey of relocation, dislocation, and love lost. Following the poet’s journey from Amherst, Massachusetts to the Danish coastline of Jutland, with a brief stop in Seattle, this collection carries the reader through a love affair set against the distant backdrop of contemporary disaster. The poet asks simply, “take me to where others are lost.” Is it possible to love and assimilate into normal life, let alone in a foreign country, when the tides of history, and the precarity of life itself, tug at the poet’s heart, jarring them into repeated moments of vivid dissociation? This Music From Another Room asks what it means to feel truly alone and alive in the burning world, and to love in spite of it.