Now You Can Join the Others - by Taije Silverman (Paperback)

About the Book

"Structured in four sections, Now You Can Join the Others investigates desire's rage and absurdities, and the concentric circles of historical, mythical, and always personal narratives that ripple through our morally beclouded era. Questions of scale ground this second collection by Taije Silverman as poems about betrayal, pregnancy, and familial grief alternate with and expand into poems about catastrophe: Argentina's junta shares space with a child's nap. A birthday party at Chuck. E. Cheese becomes an elegy for Trayvon Martin. A Greek myth won't help contextualize the 2012 rape and dismemberment of a medical student in New Delhi. With acute dissonance, the poems follow shifts of attention and association to reveal how any symbol-whether moon, pigeon, whale, or bed-continuously redefines itself in the intricacies and turns of an individual voice. The poems' settings range as widely as their tones and formal structures: Berlin's Jewish Museum, an Italian roadside motel, Charlottesville's no-longer-extant Lee Park, and Mendocino's headlands provide backdrop for memory, observation, and unexpected confrontation. For all its thematic and rhetorical variety, what unifies the book is a sense of loss of origin, but also a recognition of the origin's inevitably imaginary nature"--

Book Synopsis

Now You Can Join the Others, the second collection of poetry by Taije Silverman, traces the absurdities of desire, the shifting nature of grief, and the concentric circles of history and myth that ripple around motherhood and marriage. Set in cities around the world and on real and metaphorical islands, narratives slip between centuries and spaces: a Philadelphia bedroom and Berlin's Jewish Museum, a castle in Naples and a Chuck E. Cheese. Scenes of sexual and racial violence force an interrogation of words through a multiplicity of voices, and the othering of self becomes a shared, even reassuring alienation. From a sixteenth-century philosopher to a lecherous innkeeper in Modena, from the founding of Athens to the hatching of cicadas, this book investigates human, geological, and cyclical forms of time, suggesting that they are as material and evasive as language. Intricate, unexpected, and probing, Now You Can Join the Others is a radically candid, revelatory collection.

Review Quotes

"Now You Can Join the Others is a book of appetite, seeking, and transformation. Flooded with wild and convincing metaphor, the poems investigate forgiveness, memory, time, and desire; they are also preoccupied with democracy and its endangerment, love and its recombinations. In Taije Silverman's world, absence has hair and tells stories, the body is a jar of hours, branches are epiphanies. The speaker of these dazzling poems is deeply human, and full of contradiction and compassion, a voice that presses the reader on, as in a story where both protagonist and reader find themselves caught between if and then."--Catherine Barnett

"Burning with memory, Taije Silverman's Now You Can Join the Others is language possessed by grief and secret sight. Radiant, exact, porous. Frank and sinuous. This book is an astonishment of pages struck through with the acheful blessing of love, strange and trembling with time."--Aracelis Girmay

About the Author

Taije Silverman is the author of Houses Are Fields and cotranslator of Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli, which was shortlisted for the John Florio Prize. Silverman's poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry. She lives in Philadelphia.