Description
Hearing Other, by George Quasha (on sale through February 15, 2026)
Preverbs
ISBN 978-1-946104-72-4 / $19 US
Book Design by Susan Quasha
Cover Design by Charles Alexander
Readers, you’re in for an alphabetic shakedown. Every live matter shouts out, yet it never feels other than generous and sweet. Somehow—I take it as a miracle—the inner explosive view of the world is utterly nonviolent, for Quasha teaches us that “peace includes apparent turbulence.” That’s how and why, in the poems, we are hearing others. Every poem has an angular angel presiding over—and protecting—senses of the expansive self. The whole picture pictured by these poems gives you more than you have to give. We’re all bigger than the sum of its preverbial parts. — Al Filreis
After years of engaging with George Quasha’s expanding series of preverbs and his poetics of axial language, time, space, and movement, I have decided they are kin to the Gateless Gate and Blue Cliff Record, texts that lie at the core of the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism. Like the koans in those collections, the preverb interrupts and short-circuits the linear and the customary; its lexicon and syntax disallow our familiar certainties and closures, and in the moment of its saying it offers surprise, discontinuity, and illumination. “It starts hearing the day listening through you to your life as you see it.” — Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
I’m still swimming in this book when I come out of the water and sit in its sun. What’s to say when you know there’s nothing like Being there? Perhaps “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.” Or “Be thou me, impetuous one.” That’s Being “dictated from Eternity,” the blackbird whistling. And just after? That’s Some One Being called to “the fadeaway ways of living beauty, whose flight is momently arrested by the artful ways of verse failing to arrest it.” — Jerome McGann
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