OEI, magazine, ISBN 978-9188829146, English, 366 pages, 2023, Sweden

This is a double issue of OEI magazine edited by Michael Nardone, a poet and editor who explores the aesthetics of language and the materiality of writing. Entitled Aural Poetics, it contains a balanced selection of material that explores this form of poetics from a variety of compositional and critical perspectives. The ten sections, sometimes devoted to a single author, contain material whose form (textual, visual or anything in between) implies an attitude of ‘listening’ at some level, and as Nardone writes, ‘listening is manifold’. The reader, then, can adopt different stances in order to fully appreciate the small constellation of authors and works selected. Techniques as diverse as visual poetry, experiments with spectrograms, email conversations as well as digital collages, score visualisations or performative writing are used. Each text (or ‘inscription’) somehow resonates with the reader, whether it consists of conceptual instructions or has the depth of an essay where engagement with the works activates the coded procedures. It is a considerable amount of material structured in both a readable and anthological perspective, thus serving as both compendium and archive. The ’aural’ is influenced in many ways, but it is bravely and always generated from the printed page, rather than using digital abbreviations as QR codes.