With an economy of words and an abundance of pathos, Mike Bove's Soundtrack to Your Next Panic Attack will play its way into your heart like a favorite blues album. These poems explore nature's cycles, family dynamics, and the bittersweet spell memory casts on all of us-in Bove's words, "blending in accidental chorus / into something familiar but forgotten, / a song you used to sing and still could / if only you remembered the words."
-Ken Craft, author of Time, Please
Attuned to the soundtrack of our daily lives, Mike Bove weaves together a series of beautifully made poems that burrow to the heart of what it means to be part of a family. In this book, Mike plots a path as son, brother, father, and husband that moves from the immediate to the outside world, from the darkness in "the world / dangling from our necks" to redemption in "pockets of natural light / and trees." In "Whale Fall," a poem central to the book, he identifies stories as the maps that will lead us to a place of nourishment and renewal. The stories Mike has threaded together here create a brilliant and compassionate passageway.
-Judy Kaber, author of Renaming the Seasons
In his stunning collection, Soundtrack to Your Next Panic Attack, Mike Bove creates a map of elegies-shaping a landscape of grief and love, lamenting the loss of his father, examining the sorrows of his childhood, celebrating the difficulties and joys of parenthood and marriage, and walking us on his journey into middle age. In these poems, remembered sounds, "stone / falling heavy onto earth," objects in attics, photographs, and detritus left in drawers are relics to an ever-shifting past, to a present imbued with reflective tenderness. "We must consider ourselves / fortunate to be / brutalized by existence," Bove writes, and we come to feel along with him the wonder in all the varied shades of life-the remembered and expected pain, the joy of having and losing.
-Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds, View From a Borrowed Field, and Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora
