It is a journey into memory. In highly evocative and poetic prose, Tiny Songs takes the reader from a bedroom to multiple parts of the world. From Western Europe, to the western U.S., the slopes of Canada, the Arctic, Brazil, Japan, Hermsen goes further collecting images of despair and chaos, hope and revelation.
The Chilean poet Raúl Zurita says we would not have poetry if we had been happy. Hermsen is definitely more optimistic. Even in danger, in pain, he recovered the capacity and the happiness of singing, knowing the size of a song in front of a terrible world. Read this book and I promise you will listen to these seeds. And you will end up singing.
—Christian Formoso