Praise for subwoofer

"Rothman probes the realities of his own whiteness through audiocentric language in his debut collection. He opens with an epigraph from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: 'Who knows, but that, on the lower frequencies I speak.' But where Ellison explored the invisibility of blackness, Rothman suggests that whiteness makes itself invisible by centering itself as a default: 'I grew in my white, such a tight clock-wind.' Rothman employs a vast musical glossary and pays deep attention to sonic textures as he nurtures a rhythmic flow. Each poem bleeds into the next with captivating language: 'Their cocoon of subwoofers, a spiral of seeds/ Suspended in ruby belief.' Rothman also makes reference to black singers and writers such as Nina Simone and James Baldwin, which provides balance to the more abstract musicality that sometimes diminishes the book’s energy. Rothman makes sincere gestures toward the black creatives who have influenced him—and simultaneously makes moves to critique white supremacy and examine how culture is inherited ('Inheritance is a rifle/ We accept with little/ Consideration'). [He] evinces a willingness to listen and conscientiously seeks the frequencies where whiteness reverberates."

—Publishers Weekly

"Wesley Rothman, in his remarkable first book, is not really writing about race; he’s writing into race. Although he addresses contemporary events such as the killing of Michael Brown and frequently references and reworks the lines of African American musicians and writers, his primary interest is not in retelling racial history or recording instances of racist actions and ideas. His concern is rather to uncover what, for himself as a white person, is beneath those narratives and attitudes, and to begin the work of transformation... Rothman is not speaking for anyone, white or black. More importantly, he’s speaking on the 'lower frequencies'—exactly those picked up by the loudspeaker of his title. Not the melody, not the narrative thread, but something harder to discern... That water, fire, and spirit are all integrally fused with contemporary music and its accouterments and practitioners suggests something of the complex transformation that SUBWOOFER performs—and it’s not only music as metaphor that makes this happen... If SUBWOOFER is a record of Wesley Rothman’s own spiritual journey into his racial self, it’s also an invitation to the reader to make or continue her own. I’ll be listening for my bass line."

—Martha Collins, author of White Papers

"To produce sound, much less music, often means performing a kind of violence, whether it’s banging a drum or simply plucking a string. Subwoofer suggests that we listen more closely for the subtle reverberations of our actions, that we first ask ourselves, 'Who am I to hear, be heard?' Wesley Rothman’s collection is very much a work of—and about—rhythm. His poem, 'The Republic of Beat,' contains cadences that recall Yusef Komunyakaa: 'The jumped-up master eyes his maker— / black iris of boomtown—hushes / His woofing & joins the ranks of beat-shakers.' Words like 'beat' and 'master' echo powerfully for Rothman, whose lyrics testify to an abiding anxiety about America’s enduring legacy of racial injustice. (Baldwin, Ellison, and MLK all find themselves quoted in these pages.) With percussion as backdrop, the speaker examines his own complicity, considering 'how I might atone. How history / & the word will fasten my hands / around a post.' At times the gesture may seem a touch heavy-handed ('Brought by the vessel / Historia, I drag ashore my anchor iron'), but ultimately the poet wins the day with the sincerity of his voice, the keenness of his ear. His questions prove particularly sharp and resonant: 'If you hold the mic, who holds you?'"

—Ben Purkert, Guernica

"Wesley Rothman’s pulsating debut SUBWOOFER is a collection of the needful songs we sing for each other. The poems are full of gorgeous and introspective exclamations made out of protest, out of rhymes, out of metronomes, oceans, and love. Each poem crackles with its own unexpected rhythms and the sum of all these exquisite sounds is a thoughtful exploration of spirituality and wonder. This is a sophisticated and capacious book, one that uses the brain and ear to unknot some of the most important questions of our times."

 —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

"The musical muses are many in SUBWOOFER.  Their lyrical influence weaves throughout these lines that sway and break and damn-near robot across the pages. The poems stutter—awestruck—in joyous repetition.  But there’s trouble in the waters, too: 'Even when vibrations go missing. / There is vibration.' How does a music-loving journeyman register the tunes he grew to love but did not make?  Is it possible to 'unmake…Me'? 'We are what we /are what we never / think we are,' Sonia Sanchez wisely lamented.  But there’s courage in the asking.  Poems like 'Bars of Blue' sparkle with vigilance and inquiry. The energy is constant and the voltage never fades in Wesley Rothman’s booming debut."

—Yona Harvey, author of Hemming the Water

"Bass keeps Wesley Rothman up at night when it isn’t waking him with its low-end aubade. Still, SUBWOOFER’s subwoofer’s not conscience, but the sense that something’s amiss in the blank stillness. This uneasy vibration leads to poetry where Rothman reckons with whiteness, his whiteness. He seeks first to purge it by drowning, then by fires sustained through this urgent debut. Rothman’s desire for transformation is matched with the knowledge that it requires hard work ; this 'bruisy music strikes up the fat sobs of futility.' But if white privilege is an 'invisible badge pinned…by some legacy,' the struggle against it can also be passed on. He writes, seemingly through clenched teeth, 'This is key: redact comfort from my list of possessions.' Tune in and up to SUBWOOFER’s disquieting pulse; I suspect it will reverberate long after you read it."

—Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies

“In SUBWOOFER, Wesley Rothman commands a wider range of voices than any contemporary poet I can think of, and yet each of these voices is entirely his, and guided by his particular sensibility. Throughout the book, Rothman unflinchingly examines American Whiteness. But the almost violent variety of the poems itself is a poem on Whiteness as true as any being written today. As Rothman, following Wallace Stevens but remaining himself, writes:

‘Every figment fantasies himself the white emperor of smoke.’”

—Shane McCrae, author of In the Language of My Captor