In Frequencies, Matt Bialer, poet of the weird and inexplicable, explores the field of EVP - Electronic Voice Phenomenon. It starts with Renaissance man Friedrich Jürgenson (1903-1987), renowned in his time as an opera singer, documentary filmmaker, author, ornithologist, expert on Pompeii, master of ten languages, and painter of both landscapes and portraits-including official Vatican portraits. But his most notorious accomplishment is accidentally discovering a way to talk to the dead through the use of radio frequencies. While listening to a tape of bird songs, he kept hearing what he thought were human voices. Whispers. At first, he thought they were lost radio broadcasts... until one day he heard a strong, familiar female voice.
"Friedel, can you hear me?" it said, "It's mammy."
Friedel was his mother's nickname for him. His dead mother. These two sentences changed Jürgenson's life, opening up what he believed to be a portal to the other side.
In Frequencies, a contemporary EVP researcher named Tonya advances Jürgenson's research, fighting the severe skepticism of the scientific community while struggling to raise a son who was born deaf. Through Friedel and Tonya, Frequencies explores the true meaning of voice, and of listening-and the human ability to rise, transcend, and endure. Read. And listen. .
Matt Bialer is the author of ten books of poetry including Radius and Wing of Light (Les Editions du Zaporogue), Already Here, Ark, Black Powder, (Black Coffee Press), Bridge (Leaky Boot Press), Tell Them What I Saw (PS Publishing), He Walks On All Fours and Kings of Men (Dynatox Ministries) and Ascent (Bizarro Pulp Press). His poems have appeared in many print and online journals including Le Zaporogue, Green Mountains Review, Gobbet, Forklift Ohio and H_NGM_N. He is an acclaimed black and white street photographer and watercolorist who has exhibited widely Matt lives with his wife and daughter in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
