The Soul We Share

Ray (Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself) blends maximalist eco-poetry with the personal and elegiac in his luminous latest. His writing is informed by—and in communion with—Whitmanian expansiveness, offering the speaker license to combine the transcendental with the everyday. The collection is shot full of love and attention: “there’s love in quiet, in keeping apart. Love in the/ lonesome heart,” Ray writes. His openhearted diction is also a means of honoring the earth and those who have left it, “I have a whole lifetime’s worth of people—/ friends, lovers, family, foes—who live inside me.” Pets are included among the beloved; his dog Addie is pictured on the book’s cover. These poems are built to aid survival, recovery, and endurance in a life where “everyone sips from his own flask of hurt.” There’s an undeniable enthusiasm to Ray’s diction, “language arrived/ like a puppy in my pen”; “someone pulled/ the string on the lightbulb in my chest.” This full-throated collection beautifully honors and upholds the voiceless. (July)