While nearly all the pieces in the book are prose poems, they’re far from prosaic. One significant form of attention is listening, which ties in with the volume’s many images of music, especially improvisational music-the kind that makes art of accidents. Throughout the moving collection, Peckham never suggests that the healing, soulful work of art is easy, only that it’s possible through faithful attention.

In the hospital, the speaker “lay in a hospital bed looking at the x-rays / of my shattered hip and the fiery brightness of the pins and screws / and white-hot wires and the clouds of tissue forming around them,” which tell “of choices, and / accidents.” And yet, like the jazz recorded in bone music, “an off-note, a mistake, can be embraced by the soloist.” Even overwhelming tragedy can give rise to the grace that is art in the end, says the speaker, “Yes, these bones can sing, set all my comrades dancing, / to a ghostly tune.” The poem then turns to the 2004 auto accident in Jordan that killed the author’s first wife and older son, an event that lies behind the entire collection. X-rays capture moments of crisis, when the broken bones are “halted in ghostly / bloom,” but this is also the time when diagnosis and rehabilitation can begin their inherent process “the way bones do, all on / their own reaching for bone, reaching to make you / whole.” In their low-fidelity, scratchy fragility, the X-ray discs mimic how the body retains its injury, so that a once-broken bone aches in the cold. This startling, potent metaphor is central to the book and its images of accident, breakage, loss, healing, and transcendence. These discs were called ribs, music on ribs, bone music, or jazz on bones. These makeshift discs could then be played like any record, though they were short-lived and had poor sound quality. Bootleggers cut discs from used X-rays, burned a hole in the center with a cigarette, and employed a recording lathe to transfer grooves from a gramophone record onto the plastic. The title poem of Peckham’s latest collection (many pieces were previously published in literary journals) refers to clandestine recordings of jazz and rock ’n’ roll banned in the 1950s Soviet Union.

A volume of poetry explores how art shapes connections beyond the randomness and tragedy of loss.

Happy bones poem