Sonogram {soundwriting} by Emily Barker is a structurally inventive collection in which lyric, score, setlist, dream record and field note braid into a poetics of voice under pressure. Written from the itineraries of touring and the aftermaths of fire, flood and political drift, these poems move between venues, coastlines and hospital rooms, tracing how sound carries memory, desire, and damage. Barker’s technique is musically alert and structurally restless, shifting from compressed list poems and documentary fragments to ekphrastic and refractive pieces that treat composition as a way of thinking through time, fertility, loss and the fragile persistence of hope. Throughout, the book tests what it means to keep making songs in a world of unstable weather and unstable bodies, where rhythm becomes both witness and method.
 
ABOUT Emily Barker:
Emily Barker is a singer-songwriter and composer from Western Australia. As well as writing for screen – including the theme to BBC’s drama Wallander – she has released numerous critically acclaimed albums and tours internationally. Barker has had poems short and longlisted in National Poetry Competition, Peter Porter Poetry Prize, Keats-Shelley poetry prize and Mslexia, and poems published in The London Magazine, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review and others. Her debut pamphlet Where the Black Swans Swim came out with Broken Sleep Books in 2024.