Scoring the Silent Film

In each poem in Scoring the Silent Film, Keith Montesano uses a peripheral character in a film by such varied directors as Michael Haneke, Steven Spielberg, Wes Craven and Ang Lee to draw a deeper meaning from a fleeting scene. The poems make time stop-in the middle of madness, violence, action-long enough for us to realize how much a human life is worth. In doing so, Montesano turns the rich history of film into brilliant, unforgettable poems. - Jesse Lee Kercheval Though the poems in this ambitious collection spring from the author's abiding love of movies, their obsession is ultimately with our humanity. Violence-both realistic and fantastic-is ever-present, and emerging from the looming shadow of that violence are urgent meditations on empathy, inaction, fear, faith, and guilt. Keith Montesano has mingled the mediums of film and poetry and given us something utterly new. Scoring the Silent Film unspools before us, a poetic tour-de-force, mesmerizing and shot through with light. - Brian Barker The personas found in Keith Montesano's Scoring the Silent Film are in the voices of victims, neighbors, friends, and other shattered lives, some of who survive wearing long scars of their traumas. And yet despite these harrowing circumstances, Montesano's interpretations of characters are rendered with a profound sense of empathy as he holds the lens of his poetic gifts up close to the turbulent landscape of cinema violence, and shows us that there is still the possibility of blossoms among the ash. - Oliver de la Paz