Common Tones in Haunted Time, Jaydn DeWald

December, 2026

Alternating between dense prose poems and spare lineated “sketches,” Jaydn DeWald’s Common Tones in Haunted Time resists received notions of cohesion and instead relies—almost childishly—on the repetition of words. The result is a series of grief-induced incantations, or pain-averting word-games, that facilitate unconventional examinations of loss: “What’s going on here? What’s got into you? What made her stop dead, pressing an index finger to her lips?” Here are poems haunted by shared language and rhythms, shared objects and (psychic) spaces. In Common Tones in Haunted Time, DeWald charts their sensuous and compulsive desire to connect and commemorate, to create “a pillowy space in which to listen, and disappear.” 

Jaydn DeWald (he/they) is the author of two books, The Rosebud Variations and Sheets of Sound, both from Broken Sleep Books, as well as several limited-edition chapbooks including A Love Supreme, winner of the 2019 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest. They are Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Piedmont University in Demorest, Georgia, and serve as managing editor for C O M P: an interdisciplinary journal.