Sunday with the Sound Turned Off

This second book by Andrea Werblin is filled with wry, savvy poems embodying cautiously accepted psychic discoveries ("your better synaptic self") that gesture toward careful self-unmaskings. "So much music was misunderstood," the speaker muses in the first version of the title poem, like the youthful self-delusions to which we all must wise up - their "Lyric exhausted, impermeable to sun." The lullaby for one fist of Werblin's first book is muted here, but the speaker tells herself to accept what is, to "swear / it is nothing personal." Although these current days of rest have the sound turned off, she knows she must "rehearse, rehearse" her human perseverance.