On Music and Loss

Porter Square Books is pleased to welcome Maya Pindyck and Gwen Romagnoli, authors of Emoticoncert.

Emoticoncert follows intensities and absences across different bodies and scales. Broken up into musical movements, each section serves as its own composition. As a whole, the book works as a concert of intensities associated with loss, nationalism, and the slippery boundary between human and animal. Moving across both real and dreamed terrains, Emoticoncert is a dislocated kind of traveling linked by a sense of musicality and a desire to record the intensities that arise in the author’s entanglements with things both present and gone.

Gwen Romagnoli lived for many years in Italy, but met her Roman husband, Franco, in the U.S. Together they wrote the book, Italy, the Romagnoli Way: A Culinary Journey, about lesser-known places in Italy. Their late-in-life marriage was sadly cut short by Franco’s death. This book is dedicated to his memory.

from “7th Grade Science Lesson,” from Emoticoncert:

Ms. Weiss sticks her fist
inside a dead cow’s heart
and wears, for one brilliant minute,

a red boxing glove. Poor
heart, dumb on the table,
to teach us about form:

superior vena cava,
veins, valves, ventricles,
small, empty chambers

where blood once swarmed…