Hard Listening

by Alison Luterman

Release Date: September 16, 2024

ISBN (print): 978-1-961741-23-2

Coming Soon!

During the pandemic, Alison Luterman started taking voice lessons in order to sing and collaborate with her musician husband. She did not start out with a firm grasp of pitch or a great sense of rhythm, but had a lot of enthusiasm, a wonderful teacher, and a willingness to work hard. Learning to “speak music”—her husband’s primary language— was the key that opened them up to an unexpected depth of intimacy.

The process of learning to sing reminded her of all the singers she had idolized from a young age. She began to listen to those women again, this time with a better understanding of their skill and what their real lives were like. It became clear to Alison that beyond the glamour lay a world of challenges and sometimes heartbreak that she had not fully reckoned with before. The poems she wrote in homage to those great women singers form the core of Hard Listening.

As this investigation was going on, the United States country fell to fascism. Alison began to write poems that reflected these fraught politics and redefined her calling as a poet. These poems strive to be in service to all of us who are fighting for democracy, kindness, decency and justice.

Alison Luterman

Alison Luterman grew up in a suburb of Boston, the oldest of four children. She had her head in a book from the time she learned how to read, and got hooked on poetry when she was six years old. She is third-generation American, the great-granddaughter of immigrants who were allowed into this country at a time when they desperately needed it. She’s the inheritor of that privilege, and she doesn’t forget it.

She studied poetry at Emerson College and at UMass Amherst where her favorite teachers were Bill Corbett (Emerson), and Julius Lester (UMass.) She fell in love with Frank O’Hara and the whole New York School of poets, an influence that continues to inform her work.

After graduating, Alison joined VISTA (Volunteers In Service to America) and was sent to Miami where she worked with Haitian refugees, learned Creole, and worked as an ESL teacher and a translator for asylum cases. Returning to the Boston area, she continued to work with the Haitian community for years while attending voodun ceremonies and writing a bad novel.

After she moved to California in 1990, she worked as a freelance journalist, massage therapist, HIV test counselor, harm reduction educator for IV needle using drug addicts, drama teacher, actor in a children’s theater troupe, poet-in-the-schools, playwright-in-juvenile hall, and adult education teacher. She began to publish her poetry regularly in The Sun Magazine, and has taught at Esalen and Omega Institutes, New College, Holy Names College, The Writing Salon, and writing conferences across the country. Currently she offers one-on-one coaching as well as classes on Zoom.

For many years, Alison performed with the improv troupe Wing It! She had always sung in choruses, but during the pandemic she began studying singing with a teacher and continues to this day. She’s in a band with her husband and some friends but they don’t have a name and have not as yet played a gig anywhere. They just have fun practicing in the living room.

Her previous books are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and the e-book Feral City (now available on Audible.com.) She has also written a half dozen plays, including two musicals. She can be reached through www.alisonluterman.net .

Praise for Hard Listening

“Alison Luterman is one of my favorite poetic voices. I eat her poetry like buttered bread and it goes straight into my depleted spiritual bloodstream. The poems in this collection are luminous. They are wise without being preachy, funny and heartbreakingly real, distilled to quintessence, grounded in everyday realities that welcome her readers home to the sacred ground of their own lives. Her conversations with deceased musicians are extraordinary! I felt like I was glimpsing an intimate dance between women on opposite sides of the veil.”

— Mirabai Starr, author of Wild Mercy

“Alison Luterman somehow manages to give us hope in this nearly hopeless time, encouragement when we can barely get up in the morning, laughter and beauty when everything otherwise seems glum and dark. She sings the song of an America for which we almost forgot the lyrics and can barely recall the tune, but it lifts and consoles us.”

— Robert Reich, Professor and former United States Secretary of Labor

“Alison Luterman praises the insatiable divas: Janis, Ella, Billie, Nina, Joni, Aretha, and the many Ukrainian women keening as they sweep up broken glass. The poet joins her idols, singing and regretting and plunging forward in a wild vibrato deepened by age. This is a book about the broken promises of America and the incongruity of tradition, a fear of being in the wrong life on the wrong path that turns out to be the right path after all. It is a book about being dragged wisecracking into a sense of the larger meaning of it all.”

— Michael Simms, author of Jubal Rising

“I never know where I’m going to end up when I enter an Alison Luterman poem, but I always strap in, ready for a wild, illuminating, compassionate ride through the ‘messy beauty’ of daily life. Whether writing of a pair of pink suede boots that somehow ‘outlasted a cross-country move,/a starter marriage, and a few bouts of plantar fasciitis,’ or describing the unlikely joy of ‘how many things I’ve been wrong about,’ Luterman fills this new volume with her trademark humility and brash yet tender truths, exploring the ways we all ‘still work to/hear the wounds under the words . . . To listen/purely . . . quivering with attention.’”

— James Crews, author of Turning Toward Grief and Unlocking the Heart

“Equal parts dazzling and gritty. God, I love these poems. They’re open-throated. Funny. Fierce. Wise. They make me fall more deeply in love with the whole of life, its shit and its brilliance. Here, Alison Luterman finds music in everyday moments—losing an earring, making biscuits, changing in a locker room—and braids them with portraits of women singers and the ongoing story of her own learning to sing. She turns all into resonance. To read Hard Listening is to feel struck by the tuning fork of life, to vibrate with our own astonishing humanity, to be led toward an honest and humbling beauty.”

— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of “The Poetic Path”

“These poems are at home in the world, adept in moments––a walk around the lake with a friend, singing in the basement with a spouse, waiting for a loved-one in surgery. Luterman is a poet who rests in the complex jumble of the human, in words, “compressed to diamonds by the weight of love and time.”

— Danusha Lameris, author of Bonfire Opera and Blade by Blade