Sign-In
Cart
Existing Music
Paperback
Publisher Price: $18.95
ISBN13: 9780889714861
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Published: Oct 14 2025
Pages: 78
Weight: 0.20
Height: 0.10 Width: 5.20 Depth: 7.80
Language: English
Trillium Book Award-winner Nick Thran explores the companionship of wistful music in his fourth collection.
The poems in Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the sad song. The lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker's favourite musicians--from the long gaps between one artist's records, and grief over another's suicide, to the marvelling at another's ability to write beautiful songs about potatoes. The long poem The Minim considers the sad song from the point of view of an amateur musician at practice, using language that riffs upon an existing dictionary of musical terms with an eye towards making vigorous chambers, frivolous rooms. Lastly, the collection considers the sad song as a collaboration within communities: whether at the bookstore, within a family or between two poets who write in different languages.
Also from
Thran, Nick
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Alighieri, Dante
Pitavy, Francois
Paperback
Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback