Katherine Gibbel, Little Sound

 

It is spring

            in the yard

A remnant A shard

            The light

cooling in its glass

            A pocket

museum A natural

            history

of music On the

            party line

the first person

            listens to spring

peepers A chorus of frogs

            in an ancient play

They’re saying

hello to the pond (“The Beginning”)

A Vermont-based poet and editor/printer of the letterpress poetry series Send Me Press, Katherine Gibbel’s full-length poetry debut is Little Sound (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2026), a collection set as a handful of extended poems clustered into sections. And when I say extended, consider the fact that this is a collection made up of six individual poems, each paired into three numbered sections across eighty pages. “The first person watched the second person // watched her syntax frame his face,” closes the opening poem, “In a telegram the end becomes stop // not a precise opening of sound // It closes the message // A stop sign its promissory note // I will not stop loving you // I won’t [.]”

Curiously, the opening poem of the first section is “The End,” with the opening poem of the second section, “The Beginning,” and the opening poem of the third and final section, “The Middle,” each poem throughout providing their own take on how one might extend, further, continue, composing a lyric of extended and sequential narrative. One line and another line and then a further line. “The architecture changes when people enter,” she offers, as part of the twenty-one page poem, “The Organ,” “I learn at a talk // about the Eyo in Lagos. // They don’t stop the city’s // operations; they remind you // the city is not just what you see.” Offering a study in sound, in things and thingness, citing etymologies and the things themselves, and how those etymologies inform objects, providing a physicality across Gibbel’s musical cadence, as though physically shaped and carved by hand. As “The Organ” includes, deep within the poem:

Augustine wrote, “All musical instruments

are called organa. Not alone is that called organism,

which is large and inflated by bellows,

but whichever is fitted to accompany singing,

and is corporeal, which he who sings

 

Uses as an instrument, is called organum.”

            The syntax gets circular. I can’t follow the hell

Augustine’s describing. A man singing,

            I think.