Now You Can Join the Others

"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"--