Praise for waveforms: a short course in piano tuning:

The first thing to understand is movement: the instrument’s magic is motion and nothing more.” so begins Andrea Hackbarth’s Waveforms, and from there the reader harmonizes into the various, ranging, beautiful music of this book, which is part philosophical investigation harmony, part familial bewilderment, part detailed explication of a piano-tuner’s work. To observe to a poet share the details of an old craft such as piano tuning by one skilled in both it and poetry is a gift beyond measure. What does it mean to listen, to tune? What are the tools used? What drifts through the mind of the tuner as she uses her tines, felt, and rubber? Andrea Hackbarth gives us all this, and more. Occasional footnotes anchor what swims into association for the piano tuner as she does her work: motherhood, daughterhood, seasonality, mortality. Can these be tuned? “Can you calculate the appropriate distance between the summer berry bloom and the heater’s first early winter clicks? How much space should there be between your fingertips and the boy’s first faltering steps? How long before regret becomes nostalgia?” I learned so much about music, tuning, memory, and science in these pages… though “learning” is not quite right, as it implies the discomfort of the desk. Rather, I traveled with Hackbarth and, in doing so, expanded my sense of what might be connected through sound, through the work of making sound ring true: “Your task is manageable: lay the foundation for song. Don’t worry yet about the singing. Simply equalize the scaletones,” writes Hackbarth. As if it were simple! I have never read a book like this and, at this moment, I mourn all that has been absent from my reading. The individual wires of these poems, struck by the hammer of the mind, become music. Is there anything out of tune here? Listen, bend your ear and listen. Then listen again. More carefully. “measure the distance each note must travel to reach the other then return again home.” Adjust what you must. Tune yourself.

—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica,
editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry

I am in love with the moons, the whales, the lapping tides, and the embodied acts of musical technique in Andrea Hackbarth’s Waveforms. Hackbarth shows so clearly the infinite possibility of attention and love, grounding both practices in the relationship of a piano tuner and their instrument. Existing in the science of sound and mechanics as equally as in myth and divinity and carework, Waveforms overflows with a song that is both technical and poetic. What a loving, deeply musical (and deeply relational) gift we find in this prose poem collection!

—Han Vanderhart, author of What Pecan Light