Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence

In Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence, Martin Willitts Jr. traces the many forms silence takes across a lifetime. The silence of a deaf father who refused to learn sign language. The silence between a parent and an estranged son. The silence that follows war. And the gradual quieting of the poet's own hearing.

At the heart of this collection is a father who lost his hearing when his cannon backfired during the Second World War, and a son who would later lose his own partial hearing from shelling as a field medic in Vietnam. Between them lies a lifetime of missed words, lip-reading, fingerspelling, and the ache of communication that never quite arrives. The poems move through childhood memories of rural summers and piano music, through the brutal education of war and its aftermath, into the long grief of watching parents age and die. A mother dissolving into dementia. A father slipping away with his hearing aid still in its unopened package.

Woven throughout is another silence: the poet's son, lost to addiction, who one day calls to say he never wants to see his father again. These poems hold that absence without flinching, returning again and again to the phone that doesn't ring, the road maps that lead nowhere, the fishing trip that turned out to be their last.

Yet the collection is not without tenderness. Willitts finds solace in sign language, in weaving and sheepherding, in the patient work of hands that speak when voices cannot. The final section opens into meditation on snow, on wool spun into thread, on the quiet acts of care that persist after loss.

Dedicated to the hearing impaired, the deaf community, and all people who use sign language, this is a book about what happens in the spaces where sound should be, and how love persists across every silence.