Sum Ledger

Sum Ledger is a powerful and wide-ranging meditation - via a dazzling array of poetic forms and sources - on money, class, and poverty, that complicates the narrative of late-stage capitalism in America. Weaving together the personal with the historical, imaginative, and political, Tavel's masterfully wrought poems empathize deeply with people in distress, be it turn of the century child laborers and almshouse residents, or his own family and hard-working community college students. I can't think of a book more appropriate for our moment of political upheaval and economic crisis, or a better poet to lead us through it, with his unflinching eye, muscular language, and huge heart.- Erika Meitner
Sum Ledger is about money, its ludicrous power, and what it is like not to have access to it. It begins with a kid rolling pennies to buy diapers for his twin baby sisters and moves into a virtuosic ode to trailer parks, which gets at the exuberant sadness, the heroic lyricism, of places where real poetry is born. Tavel then opens the frame and takes excursions into the recent and distant past, from child labor to 9/11 to Nero. He builds toward a tour de force of a final movement that delves into the source of all of it via ekphrasis, history, and myth. This is a book about work, so much work. There are meter and sonnets up against the noir intensity of images. Sum Ledger is urgent, and it is masterful.- Diane Seuss
Adam Tavel weaves a spiderweb of frost on the windows of a rectory station wagon. His poems are sacred and sometimes profane. They swagger with journey and the story of a life that could be spelled out in capital letters. There is restoration to a sense of being. Here is a master of images that cut across poems. - Diane Glancy