Foreign Music

Taut and contemplative, these poems ruminate on family, exile, love, and the vagaries of human perception. Love Training encapsulates Andrs Neumans work as a poet, spanning two decades in a single unified collection. The book is divided into three sections that complement and respond to each other. The first, Love Training, focuses on family, loss, relationships, desire, and a sense of anchoring in the world. The second, Fictions of Sight, is concerned with questions of perception, perspective, language and creativity. The third, I Dont Know Why, is a whimsical set of interconnected poems that ask unanswered questions, serving as a kind of coda. While Andrs Neuman is a rightly celebrated and widely translated novelist, he is also a lucidand quite prolificpoet. Love Training is the first volume to make his sensitive, incisive poems available in English.