Archicembalo Book

Selected by judge C.D. Wright to be winner of the renowned Dorset Prize, G.C. Waldrep's ARCHICEMBALO is an acerbic, whimsical, and deeply intelligent attempt to fuse poetry and music. The book is structured after the fashion of the "gamut" or musical self-instruction primer that often prefaced volumes of 19th-century American sheet music. The titles of the poems invoke that antique form: "What is a Key Signature" "What is a Cadence" "Who is Josquin des Prez". An archicembalo (pronounced ark-e-chem-ball-o) was a complex sixteenth-century instrument, a successor to the harpsichord.

The New York Times - Stephen Burt

Waldrep's title denotes an antique keyboard instrument with 24, or many more, keys per octave. Notoriously hard to play, such instruments made subtle and challenging music, with notes a conventional score could not include. Waldrep's sometimes bewildering, often exciting prose poems make their own unconventional music, replete with slippages, repetitions, suggestions