In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Anna Zumbahlen’s poetry collection Surety imaginatively and surehandedly presents seasonal shifts both in the landscape and personal.
Sandra Lim wrote of the book:
“What kind of experience is surety? In Anna Zumbahlen’s poised lyrics, it is a nuanced and cerebral wager, offering subtlety and sensation in equal measure. Against the backdrop of a year and its seasons, the poet contends with moments of animist tenderness and personal hauntings in rural landscapes and domestic spaces. Enveloped in various atmospheres of mental and physical weather, what an intent, driven, and intimate imagination these maneuvering poems portray.”
In her own words, here is Anna Zumbahlen’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Surety:
Look at What the Light Did Now – Little Wings
When I lived in Sac City, Iowa, in my early twenties, the time in my life that Surety draws from, I was in the habit of starting a new playlist on the first of each month. This practice produced a series of playlists that replicated the subtle shift of seasons: what the light was doing. This shift was minor from June to July, but major from June to December. In the winter, I could use them to revisit summer, though I had to do so carefully to let the songs keep their seasonal mist. These are Iowa summer songs, many of which have in some way reflexed into my life lately.
I Want A House – Mr Twin Sister
Because also, context shifts despite effort to fix the feeling in time, and emotional gravity finds other centers. A couple of years ago, I fell in love with someone in California, and we saw Little Wings play in Los Angeles. Other context shifts have been smaller, sillier: to me, this song is about the little yellow house I rented in Iowa, but I recently encountered it on social media attached to a home renovation influencer’s Instagram reel.
Acid Rain – Saintseneca
Surety is about, among other things, solitude, community, farmland runoff, and love. It’s about living in a place I loved intensely but am not from and always planned to leave. One of the tensions that directs the book has to do with a lawsuit brought against drainage districts in Sac, Calhoun, and Buena Vista—three rural counties in northwest Iowa—in 2015 over farming pollution in Polk County’s watershed. I recently learned that cancer rates in Iowa are currently second-highest in the country. This is attributable, at least in part, to agricultural runoff.
Ooo – Karen O
I knew this context still mattered to the book, but I haven’t been feeling it as immediately for the last couple of years. It’s been a decade, and I’ve been living in the Southwest, in communities and climates far away from Iowa. But the feeling still gets activated by songs like this one, a sideways lullaby that goes with the poem “Increased and Spread,” which is on page 23 of Surety (and also readable here).
Regarding Ascending the Stairs – Lady Lamb
When I lived in Iowa I was often alone, but one thing that was a salve for loneliness was watching musicians on YouTube. Last fall, I made the weird discovery that this singer is an old friend of someone close to me. The world is small, and heartbreak is abstract until it isn’t, and you can inhabit someone else’s articulation of heartbreak (through music, through poetry) until it becomes personalized. And then it is differently meaningful.
Ramona Reborn – Delicate Steve
I loved this song in my yellow house in Iowa, rediscovered it in a little blue house in Joshua Tree nine years later, saw Delicate Steve play in a roadside bar in Ojai a few months ago. This song is a soundtrack for the parts of the book that are and are not me, the questions that are and are not still present for me. Recently, a friend was telling me about how it felt for her to read work she wrote a decade ago, to realize that it held the same questions and tensions she continues to turn over. But it’s a hopeful sort of discovery, to find your present self in an old self, and vice versa. In a text, she said:
Yeah for me its like “you don’t have anything”
And its like actually I have a whole history and arsenal
Swim Club – The Cave Singers
It took me years to finish writing Surety because it felt entirely too artificial, tonally impossible really, to write Iowa summer from winter elsewhere. I kept coming up against the same concerns: how to activate the archive of self, or document how impressions accumulate and change over years, without imposing an artificial narrative on experience. How to sit inside and reproduce the tone of a scene not immediately present. What music and poetry might do with memory through repetition and reconsideration over time, especially with attention to questions about language, connection, and certainty, which are still very much my questions. In any case, this song corresponds to a poem about Ledges State Park on page 58.
Don’t Carry It All – The Decemberists
A couple of weeks ago at The Echo, a singer triggered for me a visceral memory of driving to Iowa from Denver for the first time. That experience of the past collapsing into the present was not actually precipitated by The Decemberists but by Truman Sinclair. He is in a different phase of life than Colin Meloy now, but he has a similar sort of energy and is a heartful boy with a harmonica. I have also been thinking a lot about One Week in January by Carson Ellis (who is married to Colin Meloy), a book that is a perfect case study in the strangeness of reanimating self-archive. One peculiarity of publishing is that it is so slow, but it makes gone or changed intimacies immediate again.
Bird of Paradise – Frazey Ford
I feel like this song has been sampled in something? It has a contextual echo that I can’t place or define. But this is the version I had with me in Iowa, and now I live in California, and in the yard there is a fig tree, a rosemary bush, and a bird of paradise.
Sonsick – San Fermin
And resolve to love.
Who Knew – You Won’t
This song has retained its context for me more purely than others, and to me it’s about unconditional love. I liked to listen to it every time I turned south off of Highway 20 to come home to Sac City.
Anna Zumbahlen is a poet living in Southern California. She holds a PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Montana, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship. Read recent work at www.annazum.com.