Skip to main content
Books, videos, and music - all free from your public library!
LoginSign Up

Footer

Hoopla logo, Go to homepage
  • For Patrons
  • For Libraries (opens in new window)
  • For Vendors (opens in new window)
  • Facebook (opens in new window)
  • X (opens in new window)
  • Instagram (opens in new window)
  • YouTube (opens in new window)
  • TikTok (opens in new window)
  • LinkedIn (opens in new window)

Our Company

  • Our Story
  • Get Hoopla for your Library (opens in new window)
  • Get your content on hoopla (opens in new window)
  • Join our team (opens in new window)
  • Accessibility Statement

Our Content

  • Audiobooks
  • Ebooks
  • Movies
  • Television
  • Comics
  • BingePasses
  • Music
  • The Loop Blog

Help

  • Help Center
  • Submit Feedback
  • Facebook (opens in new window)
  • X (opens in new window)
  • Instagram (opens in new window)
  • YouTube (opens in new window)
  • TikTok (opens in new window)
  • LinkedIn (opens in new window)
  • Download on the App Store (opens in new window)
  • Get it on Google Play (opens in new window)
  • Available at Amazon Appstore (opens in new window)
© 2026 Midwest Tape, LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use
  • Hoopla logo
  • Browse
  • My Hoopla
  • Log In
  1. Navigate Home
  2. Ebooks
  3. Song & Error

EBOOK

Song & Error

Poems

Averill Curdy
(0)
sign up
Pages
112
Year
2014
Language
English
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About

A lush, lyrical debut from a vibrant new poetic voice

A sparrow like a "fumbled punch line" is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age.

In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal's beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy's poems strive to endure within "the crease of transformation" and to speak-sing-of that terrible beauty.

Related Subjects

  • American
  • Poetry
  • Adult Nonfiction
  • Women Authors

Reviews

"Song & Error is a worthy debut collection that rewards multiple readings. It's a rich mixture of poems that revel in their language and ideas, their combination of real and imagined, of present day and history, that, while sometimes dense, sometimes obscure, sometimes confounding, nevertheless present enough striking images, precisely fashioned phrases and intriguing words to fully stock a wunder
Adam Ford, Bookslut
"Throughout this long-awaited debut, Curdy constructs a realistic surface of her inner life, whereby daily perceptions--mediated through her immersion in art and aesthetics, apocrypha, historical facts, classical literature, and Americana--merge into a careful sounding of human redemption and grace . . . Curdy's intellect is engaging enough that she never betrays her gift through ornamental preten
Major Jackson, The New York Times Book Review
"Curdy is a poet in the highest order. Her musicality finds its counterparts in Auden, Donne, Hopkins, and Merrill, to whom she seems to have apprenticed her syntax and ear. But there is something else in her writing that is entirely her own, an almost excessive pleasure in texture and alliteration that has been unfashionable in poetry of late. Curdy's precisely conjured images and similes transfo
Maya Catherine Popa, The Rumpus

Artists

Averill CurdyAuthor