World Too Loud To Hear

Stephen Kampa’s World Too Loud to Hear confronts today’s zeitgeist of dark social norms online or off. Our litany of individual and collective shortcomings is laid bare or castigated—as, for instance, with obligations we abhor, avoid, and “can’t wait / to pass down to the upstart generations.” The delivery ranges from straight or subtle to rants and execrations, while the settings range from historic and current affairs to the imaginary, dystopian, sci-fi, or surrealistic. This sui generis collection is fearless in hope, with a sobering take on our acceleratingly fearful national and global trajectory. PRAISE FOR WORLD TOO LOUD TO HEAR: Stephen Kampa’s World Too Loud to Hear is a book about America’s “slow-motion, decades-long cascade / of violence . . .”—gun violence by and against children, violence of tech-driven accelerating change, and violence that permeates almost every aspect of our online lives. These amazing poems manage to be at once outraged and witty, inventive and passionate, nuanced and blunt. I can’t think of another book that captures so completely the lunatic reality of self-destruction. Stephen Kampa is fabulous poet, and this is a fabulous and important book. —Alan Shapiro, author of Proceed to Check Out and Against Translation Stephen Kampa’s World Too Loud to Hear takes on the noise of the twenty-first century with a furious love and attention. The poems in this book lay out our terrible addictions—to gun violence, to scientism, to screens, to empty celebrity, to social division, to anger itself. But they also show us what remains worth saving from those evils: children, magic, and mystery. These poems delight equally in novel syllabic stanzas, calm iambics, and drumming accentuals, and they ratchet up poetic form to the tension of a crossbow, with the same deadly aim. They use change-up rhyme patterns, sonics, wordplay, and narrative drama to keep us tumbling forward, through etymology and child abuse, homage and political hackery, near-despair and struggling faith. And they often arrive at the sort of poetic closure that makes a reader freeze and gasp. —Maryann Corbett, author of In Code and Street View Juggling Horatian and Juvenalian satire with surgical wit and polemical yet coy imbalances, Stephen Kampa’s speakers are the needling social critics, cultural anthropologists, and litigator-jesters. I have not read a collection of poetry that better tackles social injustices and apathies, gun violence, religious hypocrisy, climate change, and our subservience to technology. Kampa shows us ourselves: combing the Almighty WebMD to wrangle with our psychosomatic homunculi, constructing our digital personae and elevating our experiences to impress other inflated personae, and being lured into divisiveness by cartoonish political buffoonery. In this World Too Loud to Hear, Kampa reminds us through his maw-opening critiques and funhouse mirrors that we have lost our benevolence and are becoming untethered from the one objective truth from which we humans can find insights: the natural world. —Adam Vines, author of Lures and Out of Speech ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephen Kampa is the author of four collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible, Bachelor Pad, Articulate as Rain, and World Too Loud to Hear. He is a winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Collins Prize, and the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry. He has been a resident at Art342 and at the Amy Clampitt House. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry. He has also worked as a musician and appears on multiple albums from WildRoots Records.

An NPR Great Read: This novel about bipolar disorder and one man’s journey through the world is a “convincing portrait of mental illness” (Entertainment Weekly). This tour-de-force novel takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd—a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter for a decade to travel the globe, finally giving free rein to the bipolar disorder he’s been forced to keep hidden for almost twenty years. The story intricately weaves together three timelines—Greyson’s wanderings to Rome, to Israel, to Santiago, to Thailand, to Uganda; the progressive unraveling of his own father as seen through Greyson’s childhood memories; and the intricacies and estrangements of his marriage—all of which unfolds in a narrative spanning twelve thirty-second electroshock treatments in a New York psychiatric ward.

The surprising science of hearing and the remarkable technologies that can help us hear better Our sense of hearing makes it easy to connect with the world and the people around us. The human system for processing sound is a biological marvel, an intricate assembly of delicate membranes, bones, receptor cells, and neurons. Yet many people take their ears for granted, abusing them with loud restaurants, rock concerts, and Q-tips. And then, eventually, most of us start to go deaf. Millions of Americans suffer from hearing loss. Faced with the cost and stigma of hearing aids, the natural human tendency is to do nothing and hope for the best, usually while pretending that nothing is wrong. In Volume Control, David Owen argues this inaction comes with a huge social cost. He demystifies the science of hearing while encouraging readers to get the treatment they need for hearing loss and protect the hearing they still have. Hearing aids are rapidly improving and becoming more versatile. Inexpensive high-tech substitutes are increasingly available, making it possible for more of us to boost our weakening ears without bankrupting ourselves. Relatively soon, physicians may be able to reverse losses that have always been considered irreversible. Even the insistent buzz of tinnitus may soon yield to relatively simple treatments and techniques. With wit and clarity, Owen explores the incredible possibilities of technologically assisted hearing. And he proves that ears, whether they're working or not, are endlessly interesting.

From award-winning blogger Melissa Camara Wilkins, come and find a stunningly simple path to confidence and clarity. All you have to do is give yourself permission to show up as your gloriously imperfect self. Trying to fix yourself is exhausting. But being yourself - that is both possible and life-giving. The key is a simple heart-shift from chasing after perfection to learning to tell a truer story about ourselves, the world, and our place in it. Melissa Camara Wilkins invites you into her journey of discovering the profound simplicity of dropping the pretenses and allowing ourselves to be fully human - flaws and all. This is a story about making life simpler by letting go of who you think you're supposed to be and becoming who you really are. With wit and compassion, Melissa explores how to be present, show up as your real self, and get comfortable in your own skin by aligning the truth inside you with the life you live on the outside. Gain confidence with the freeing practices of dropping the mask, abandoning the experts, and understanding your real assignment. With refreshing honesty and insight, Melissa invites you to move from the either/or dichotomy into a spacious freedom of embracing the both/and - brave and scared, messy and real, gloriously imperfect and absolutely enough. This is your permission slip to be your whole, human self. For everyone who feels the pressure to fit in, measure up, and get it together, Permission Granted is a life-giving invitation to soul-level simplicity.

A fable about the power of books and knowledge, “finely balanced between pathos and comedy,” from one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular authors (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—the ability to quote the Talmud, Hegel, and Lao-Tzu. In this “irresistibly eccentric romp,” the author Milan Kundera has called “our very best writer today” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word (The New York Times Book Review).

When the world gets too loud and chaotic, a young boy’s grandfather helps him listen with wonder instead. Kids laughing, sneakers squeaking, balls bouncing—for Thunder, the sounds of the school day often brew into overwhelming noise storms. But when Thunder’s mosom asks him what he hears on an urban nature walk, Thunder starts to understand how sounds like bird wings flapping and rushing water can help him feel calm and connected. Gentle, inviting illustrations by Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley emphasize Mosom’s lessons about the healing power of the world around us.

For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor at The New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she couldn't hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was "the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century." Audiologists agree that we're experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss—17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown. Shouting Won't Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition. The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it's like to live with an invisible disability—and a robust prescription for our nation's increasing problem with deafness. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

There are dozens of misconceptions about hearing aids: “They make you look old.” “They cause ear infections.” “They increase hearing loss.” “I can’t afford one.” This misinformation impairs a person’s quality of life by discouraging them from pursuing help. Technological advances have enabled hearing aids to address a greater range of hearing losses, while making them smaller, better designed, and easier to use than those of the past. More people than ever can benefit from a hearing aid, yet of the nearly thirty million people with a hearing impairment, only about 20 percent choose to use one. In Overcoming Hearing Aid Fears, audiologist John M. Burkey addresses common fears, concerns, and misconceptions about hearing aids to help readers decide whether these devices will prove useful. Using an informal, anecdotal style informed by years of clinical practice, Burkey provides practical information about hearing aid styles, options, and costs. His expertise and experience in caring for more than 50,000 patients will help people with hearing loss address their personal concerns. The book also helps friends and family understand why a loved one might resist getting a hearing aid, and offers tips on counseling. Audiologists will find this text an important educational tool in advising their own patients. Approximately 10 percent of Americans (and nearly one-third of people age seventy and older) have some degree of hearing loss that, if left untreated, causes frustration, isolation, and depression. A hearing aid is a simple tool to improve careers, relationships, and self-esteem, and to provide independence and security. Overcoming Hearing Aid Fears can help readers take that first step to a better life.