Vox Humana, the title of E. Alex Pierce’s first collection, comes from the name of a pipe-organ stop designed to produce tones resembling those of the human voice. Voice is important in these poems. So is theatre. For the most part, we’re listening to the stories of women, though the poems dramatize a wide range of characters: porcupines, Penthesilea’s horse, a German-speaking man, a fetus.
Taken together, these poems perform a universal voice—“the under-singing.” This is also the voice of the book’s narrator: it is her story, though its versions are legion. In “A girl awake” her father says, “What a waste…. You should have been a boy.”
