The Ritualites is Michael Nardone's book-length poem on the sonic topography of North America.

Composed over ten years at sites all across the continent--from Far Rockaway to the Olympic Peninsula, Great Bear Lake to the Gulf of California--the book documents the poet's listening amid our public exchanges, mediated ambiances, and itinerant intimacies. The Ritualites is a series of linguistic rituals that shift, page to page, through a range of forms and genres--a rhapsodic text for occasional singing and a best-selling thriller, a self-help guide and sabotage manual, a score for solo performance and a cacophony of voices.

The Ritualites is Michael Nardone's book-length poem on the sonic topography of North America.

Composed over ten years at sites all across the continent--from Far Rockaway to the Olympic Peninsula, Great Bear Lake to the Gulf of California--the book documents the poet's listening amid our public exchanges, mediated ambiances, and itinerant intimacies. The Ritualites is a series of linguistic rituals that shift, page to page, through a range of forms and genres--a rhapsodic text for occasional singing and a best-selling thriller, a self-help guide and sabotage manual, a score for solo performance and a cacophony of voices.

Michael Nardone's profile page

Praise for The Ritualites:"A good prose poet is always all ears. There's an understanding in Nardone's poems of the way said and unsaid start and stop each other, how there's always something heard plus something pulling what you hear." --Emma Healey, author of Stereoblind

"The Ritualites is a spellbinding collection of North America's sonic architecture and Nardone is a poet of its topologies, listening to the air when the body stops. The Ritualites is the jukebox of place; embodied leakages of the night, the shout, the cry and the laughter. A poetics of what language lays bare: little panic breaths, sound permitted in a cell. In The Ritualites, Nardone reminds us that language is wielded and listening is a verb." --Jordan Scott, author of Blert and Night & Ox