#Review: Amasa Speaker Factory by Chad Faries

Amasa Speaker Factory is a difficult book to describe neatly, which is probably part of its charm. It is a poetry collection rooted in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but it also feels like a scrapbook of family, place, memory, music and growing up. The poems draw heavily from Faries’ own experiences, though the author makes it clear that the speaker is not always simply himself.

What I enjoyed most was the way the book turns ordinary memories into something larger. In “Cadenza for 711 Roosevelt Street,” the line “No one ever really left” stayed with me. It captures one of the book’s biggest ideas: leaving a place does not necessarily mean escaping it. Childhood, family and landscape continue to follow you, even when the physical place has changed.

There is also a strong sense of sound running through the collection. Radio static, songs, voices and broadcasts appear again and again. In “Cadenza for 711 Roosevelt Street,” the family is described through “a scatter of say-sos caught in the wires— / each syllable a ghost / trying to find a home.” It is a beautiful image for memory itself: fragmented, distorted, but still trying to reach us.

The book is not always easy to read, though. Some poems are so packed with images, references, names and sudden shifts that I sometimes felt I was chasing the poem rather than experiencing it. The later “cadenzas” especially become quite free-form. That seems intentional—the author describes them as improvisational spaces—but it can still make the collection feel uneven.

Still, there is something honest about the messiness. Amasa Speaker Factory is nostalgic without being sentimental and personal without always being comfortable. It feels like someone turning an old radio dial and suddenly finding a voice from another time.

Not every poem worked equally well for me, but the ones that did were memorable. This is a collection to wander through rather than rush through.

Find this book here.