Radio Silence

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Poetry. Through vivid and sometimes startling image and music, RADIO SILENCE turns absence into sound. The poems in this new collaborative collection by Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney come up against death and pursue its mysteries: its arrival, its damages, and its meaning for those on the periphery. This is a world where "orange trees rise / from the pockets of the dead, / where we burn / hornet nests and keep / watermelons in the well, / where ghosts have a way / of making themselves / found." This is a world that hinges on transitions young boys crawling in the attic become old men opening wrinkled palms; a sky of magpies becomes a sky of crows. The result is a collection of stripped-down, urgent poems that make no clear boundary between the authors' identities. From this liminal space emerges a third voice that is both and neither and something in-between. "In the forgetting / dark, we take off our names. We become / something like lightning, cracked bone."

"Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney have closed their eyes and listened: weathers, dance halls, bright-and- darkening towns... the blaze of certain silences, 'flaring ghosts.' RADIO SILENCE is an exquisite dream of transport." Joanna Klink

"In these collaborative emergency poems, Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney remind us that silence doesn't need to be disconcerting, even 'in the chop of a storm / only the future saw coming." But RADIO SILENCE doesn't fill in the gaps in transmission. Instead it attends to what emerges from those gaps when one really listens: SILENCE becomes noise; noise becomes music; music becomes a message an old friend saying the perfect next thing. 'There is the giving and the taking and the taking / back, ' but what's more there is what's left over in the wake of disappearance, the afterglow of vanishment, the haunted present moment. These poems crackle with the notion that we are never alone, if we can only allow ourselves to pay attention with imagination and faith, in awe of the darkness and light that surrounds us." Matt Hart"