Eliot Cardinaux: This Music From Another Room

This Music From Another Room, the third and final installment of a chronological trio of books by Eliot Cardinaux (beginning with Quiet Labor and Toy Elegy) published by The Bodily Press in 2024, is an odyssey of relocation, dislocation, and love lost. Following the poet’s journey from Amherst, Massachusetts to the Danish coastline of Jutland, with a brief stop in Seattle, this collection carries the reader through a love affair set against the distant backdrop of contemporary disaster. The poet asks simply, “take me to where others are lost.” Is it possible to love and assimilate into normal life, let alone in a foreign country, when the tides of history, and the precarity of life itself, tug at the poet’s heart, jarring them into repeated moments of vivid dissociation? This Music From Another Room asks what it means to feel truly alone and alive in the burning world, and to love in spite of it.

Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, and translator working at the intersection of the lyric and improvised music. The author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023), Eliot has produced over a dozen albums of original music, as well, including American Thicket (Loyal Label, 2016) with Mat Maneri, Thomas Morgan, and Flin van Hemmen, and most recently, Imminence (self-released, 2024), with American percussionist Gary Fieldman. He is the founding editor of The Bodily Press.

“In This Music From Another Room, Eliot Cardinaux’s search for a place that is “more memory than memory” is woven through verses that wring light from loneliness, reshaping the space of exile and yearning with a strange beauty and hunger reminiscent of Celan. The musicality of Cardinaux’s poetry pushes us to confront “what right now / cannot provide,” reminding us that we are always crossing borders, pursuing a place of belonging.”

—Rebecca Faulkner, author of Permit Me to Write My Own Ending

“In this book’s concluding section, Eliot Cardinaux gives us seven syllables that hold the whole arc of This Music From Another Room: “I wash the smoke / off my hands.” Smoke is never nearer to love’s fire than it is in Cardinaux’s poetry — “the flash & grace of it,” the way the flame peaks in the high heat of early, intense romance and then leaves behind the cool ash of a love burned through. Cardinaux’s poems offer this loss an architecture & trajectory, tracing its shape across the contours of a complex relationship as it flowers and then is unexpectedly cut short. The textures of love’s dissolution are made richer by the many different distances the poems negotiate: across two countries (from Amherst to Seattle and back, from Copenhagen to the Danish coastline), across the Atlantic, and even across languages (“Did I spell that right? / Did my language please you?”). This Music From Another Room is, indeed, pleasing, and carries the reader through the twin tumults of love & grief like a beautiful tune. These deft and remarkable poems are, to borrow a line from their author, as “piano keys jostling up & down under hands of light.””

—Tom Snarsky, author of Reclaimed Water and Light-Up Swan