Existing Music

Trillium Book Award-winner Nick Thran explores the companionship of melancholy music in his fourth collection.

The poems in Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the “sad song.” In the first section, the lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker’s favourite musicians—from the long gaps between one artist’s records and grief over another’s suicide to the marvelling at another’s ability to write “beautiful songs about potatoes.” The second section, a long poem called “The Minim,” considers the sad song from the point of view of an amateur musician at practice, using language that riffs upon an existing dictionary of musical terms with an eye towards making “vigorous chambers, frivolous rooms.” The third section considers the sad song as a collaboration within communities: whether at the bookstore, within a family or between two poets who write in different languages.