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Praise for ever really hear it

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Open your ear to Soham Patel’s ever really hear it, and find a twisted lullaby courting you into a phantasmagoric dream caught some place between the chaos of migration and a garden. Patel, in this astonishing accomplishment, engages a poetic of the toughly textured utterance, “scratched wood scratch metal”—one that speaks into the mouth of what music might be if it were a body with experience. That’s how we hear it, like Tina Turner sings in “Proud Mary,” “See we never do nothing / nice, easy / We always do it nice and rough.” A rock riff, a blues for a broken heart, a limp, ever really hear it situates Soham Patel’s poems in a breaking-glass lyric, stripping the soul, and stroking it too, in a way we desperately need now.

~ DAWN LUNDY MARTIN

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Soham Patel writes poems the way I want to be kissed—with fervent challenge, presence, and sensual intelligence. She reminds me that when the instrument breaks, the desire for melody— that longing for a sinuous connection across divides—persists. She takes us nimbly across broken houses, wretched dive bars, sodden river beds, and historical oppressions in pursuit of this tune, not blinking at pain or other glories in the veldt of desire. Have you been held in the cut of Soham’s song? It’s the softest and to the quick.

~ SUEYEUN JULIETTE LEE

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Soham Patel writes of music & the attempt to really hear it as a triggering memory of personal narratives, as a field of political connectivity & disconnect, as an ever-fallible & ever-fluxing communion with the unknown, as a way to make sense of this world of noise. ever really hear it is vulnerable & it is smart. It leaves me quoting unforgettable lines to friends & returning on repeat to parse its complexities. Patel passionately explores the many ways that music has no upper limit, how music “can breathe / like ink or glister white shine on bone and break.”

~ MATHIAS SVALINA

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