Two decades after confessionals urged readers to chase epiphanies across oceans, A Poise of Echoes turns inward—into kitchens at 3 a.m., into rehearsal rooms that smell like dust and coffee, into the ordinary Midwest where grief is polite and stubborn. Walter Jensen, grandson of dairy farmers and a meticulous account manager in Milwaukee's Third Ward, collected sounds as if they were prayers: radiator hisses, the river under the Holton Street Bridge, his mother's breath when she didn't know anyone was listening. He wanted a life that felt earned and quiet. Instead he found a frequency he could not stop tuning to, and it nearly erased him.
In 2001, a neighbor slid a flyer under his door—open mic, Thursday—and Walter followed its jagged tear line to a narrow bar on Locust Street. That's where he met Mira Anwar, a drummer from Dearborn with a rust-red Yamaha kit and a laugh that could reset a room. She swore she'd failed out of being an artist; he swore he had no business on a stage. They started as collaborators, then confidents, then a daily habit. There were Polaroids stuffed in a shoebox, a dented thermos, a battered Tascam recorder, a bottle of Laphroaig hidden behind the flour canister. When a van slid on black ice on I-94—Mira's wrist shattered, Walter's back lit up like a siren—the prescriptions and the promises started to sound the same.
Rehabs and halfway houses, a treatment center near Oconomowoc, a pastor who brewed tea stronger than his sermons, a relapse that turned a kitchen into a courtroom—Walter and Mira kept saving and sinking each other. What do you call devotion when it keeps you underwater? How do you stop fixing someone without abandoning them? And what happens to the music when the band you built together finally breaks? A Poise of Echoes is for anyone who has timed their day to another person's pulse—or to a bottle, a pill, a craving—and who longs, at last, for the quiet after the feedback fades.
