SILENCE IS GOLDEN!

SILENCES: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LOSS is now officially released by Blue Lion Books (thank you Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Peter Ganick!). You can order it from Blue Lion's Cafe Press site HERE!

This is my 15th poetry collection, and 12th print poetry collection. Part of the challenge of being so prolific is creating books that are very different from each other. I can promise you that this poetry collection is very different from others I've done in the past -- who else can present a hidden tale of eros within a 34-day list of (real-life) garbage? Moi, but of course!

My favorite section of SILENCES' nine sections is a compilation of art criticism that meld to create a de facto autobiography ... so that though each essay was written as individual assignments covering specific art exhibits, when bundled up together, they manifest the section's title of "Art Criticism: A Recovered Memoir".

This is also a 402-page book spanning genres. And it's what I consider my authentic "black book" ... for such works as "What You Don't Know About Me" which begins

Someone once called you a file cabinet. Careful not to slur his words, the stranger explained that you are too democratic: you lack discrimination about what slips into the dark recesses of your memory. As drunks often do, he belabored his point. To be "meticulously clear," the stranger proclaimed as he waved his empty glass at the bartender, he added that your body has even come to look like a filing cabinet: dusty, dented in places, and always in the corner of a room uninvolved in the activity surrounding it. Actually, the stranger--everyone is a stranger to you--was attempting a joke. But you didn't laugh and neither did I.

Or this excerpt from the poem "Samba Pa Ti (#3)":

For fire to bloom a rose
in the middle of an ocean
a boat must burn

For our pens to mate
the red velvet chair
in the dungeon must crash

For a steeple
to spiral across night sky
a man will lose a hand

Okay. That should be enough of a tease. Hopefully, you're intrigued enough to order it.

And please to contact me at GalateaTen@aol.com if you're interested in reviewing it (though not for my Galatea Resurrects since I edit it). Oh, okay okay -- one more tease: here's an excerpt from "The Artist Looks at the Model":

*

"Never before," she acknowledged through a set of contexts as varied as my promiscuous judgments on the same slice of weather. Plus, I am a Grand Master at using names to create. Once, I called her a "landlady." I was riveted, watching her try to fix my plumbing. I counted as, one by one, her fingernails betrayed their French manicures.

*

She became the wind after she lost all misgivings about drying my feet with her hair. It was a day bequeathed by a leap year. She forgot the word she had saved secretly for a special occasion to unload on me--such a big world of meaning in what would have been spelt as a couple of letters: N-O. It would have been. Such a big world.

*

This time, I used both palms to shape "L"s into a frame. She was the wind, but still too gentle. "You can do it!" I egged her on with sincere irritation on my unshaven face. I molded wind into a body for nothing is risked without bacteria. I felled her to her knees. She was up to it. Once, she jutted out her lower lip. I bit it. She was up to it.