Nerves Between Song

Geoffrey Olsen

Geoffrey Olsen’s debut collection Nerves Between Song takes on the urgent moment at the ambient level. Its five reverberating sequences of poems collect the overtones, undertones, and dreamlike ligaments of political and ecological catastrophe. With “hearing stretched to the exacting charge” of experience in all its multiplicity, Olsen disambiguates syntax, the body, and the so-called natural world into “tensing segments,” holding quiet chords until they fray into “lush interference.” Though “offered as noise,” the poems echo into a powerful music of fur, spores, an extinct meadow, clusters of jellyfish, ash, hooves, orange petals, a dog skeleton, purple skies, moss, synthetic coral, a tiger, pupae, ghosts, a wolf in an abandoned McDonalds. It is a music peopled with guides and fellow-travelers, from Apichatpong Weeresethekul to Leslie Scalapino, whose echoes meet in the haunted bioluminescence of Olsen’s “communist forests.” Inventive, generous, and ceaselessly alert to its own shades of radiance, Nerves Between Song draws so close to the present tense we can almost lick it.