Echo Chamber

Echo Chamber is a follow-up on Renee Norman and Carl Leggo’s Hearing Echoes, which was a collection of poetry that moved between two strong voices—a man and a woman—focusing on family relationships in all their intersections and differences.

Echo Chamber releases following the death of co-author Carl Leggo and serves as a love letter to him from surviving author, Renee Norman, remembering his love and their previous work together.

“Resistance, regret (“death’s pollen”), release… aches, angst, acceptance…life-journeys are visited in night’s dawning. “A hallowed haunting,” Echo Chamber is a startling offering that leads readers to the edges of death, and re-turns home to love—echoes of joy, loss, grief, gratitude awakening what is forgotten in life’s turbulence. Deeply intimate, Echo Chamber shares Renee Norman’s visits to her mother, institutionalized in “the intersection of broken dreams” even as she celebrates becoming “a grandmother at last”; Carl Leggo offers “a table of contentments” in the midst of his cancer treatment, his lyrical voice naming granddaughters into presence. Darkly humorous, vividly forgiving, Echo Chamber calls us to be present here and now: “a heart beat/ a light breath/…a game of peek a boo/ scribbles in the snow” – sound echoes in my heart’s delight. I laughed, and I wept.”

— Lynn Fels, author of Releasing Hope

“In their remarkable poetic collection Echo Chamber, Renee Norman and Carl Leggo beckon us to “live with love’s tenderness” and remind us that “love is never running out of stories.” Gary Geddes once wrote that “all good poems, whatever their subject matter, are love poems.” Renee’s and Carl’s inspiriting artistry invites us into worlds filled with joy and gratitude, grief and regret, hearts broken and mended and remembered. In turn we weave the echoes of their beautiful poems into our own storied worlds, into “the family of things,” as Mary Oliver wrote, to hold these gifts with gratitude and love.”

—Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Professor Emerita, University of Lethbridge