[11/15/26] Freedman, Lewis: Trillium Bsalm

Astonishing, polyvalent, lyrical, but with an easy prosaic voice, Lewis Freedman’s Trillium Bsalm makes an immersive and compelling argument, even through its homophonically translated title, for the healing nature of song (-cum-poem). Through a ‘mispunning’ translation of the Hebrew Tehillim (psalms), and with a sonically winning and intellectually engaging style, Freedman experiments with whether ‘emo and drastic’ tercets can remove bad energies from the world (spoiler: they can). –Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Digressive, buzzy poems snake through Trillium Bsalm in a stream of tercets. Cosmic and material realms conjunct in thorny tales of doubt and prophecy, and an everyday song sings of self-reflexive wonder at “this negation repeat / in my voice.” Transported to a disquieting universe of utterance, we note our own audacity to abide the enjambed line, the momentary conveyance of soul’s desire, the salve heard in the salvo. –Kimberly Alidio

Early in this lovely collection of “mispunned translations of psalms” Lewis Freedman writes “understanding is useless / play is everything" & in this edict the poems, fraught with real concern—some bleak testament—are also given their levity. Here we are plunged into a world of continual transmogrifications; heavens & ladders & buckets & keys, some ever-looming threat, some, possibly, saving grace in the movement & music itself. Freedman writes into this work a plea for the good & the simple “saying to my / mirror, let goodness / good the good / staying simple because / it’s simple" & the playfulness here is fragile but insistent, the constraint of the tercets generates a momentum almost breathless & wheeling, as of flying. The whole project feels semi-mystical in its threaded touching between the surfaces & deeps of both ordinary & conceptual things, & carries within its virtuosic & delightful permutations the facticity of some respite hovering there. –Cody-Rose Clevidence