"With an eye for detail and with textured language, Mariano Zaro's The Weight of Sound asks the ineffable questions: how do we all suffer?-how do we survive the suffering? This collection's poems bristle with gorgeous syntax which allows the reader to feel, as the speaker in 'After the Diagnosis' says, 'as though beauty could cure anything.' You, dear reader, will want to know."

-Lynne Thompson, Los Angeles Poet Laureate Emerita

"Mariano Zaro's seventh book of poetry, The Weight of Sound, is steeped in the drama of impermanence, the inevitable loss of all sentient beings-from the fragile butterfly to our own failing bodies. 'I end where my body ends, ' Zaro writes in one poem, where a child pricks a finger, holding it outstretched, 'like a candle or a lighthouse.' As a child, the speaker tried to stave off the inevitable with pen and paper-'Each body labeled, organized, immutable.' In these poems, the poet strives to hold on to what is departing, to what has already departed: 'I call you by your name and all the names. / I call you by no name at all.'"

-Blas Falconer, author of Rara Avis