Customer Reviews

What Silence Equals: Poems

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This is one of the most important volumes of poetry in our time. I have been dazzled by the bravery and the intimacy of this great poetry. Like a contemporary Dostoevsky stood up against a wall for execution and even more excruciatingly pardoned, for a time, this young woman has created a poetry pof survival and p[ersistence and pluck that puts her elders to shame. A true shame. Who has written, iun the last decade, any poem as powerful as her Jade or as Poem for a Poem? She has taken the hedonism and whimsy of the New York Schpool and strangled it severely. Though shre has suffered, she has created, like Ginsberg, a poetry of comradely love and blistering vision. She has given us a book of this era, fresh as a snapshot, elongated as a dirge. We all look forward to her continued courage; we look forward to her next book, like a letter that we hardly deserve. This is a poet who has dealt with an infinite burden, with the virogorous wit of a revolutionary.

I'm a friend of the author and wanted to share some reviews of the book:

"There has never been a poetry quite like this before, so passionately and understandably barbaric...and, withal, stormily beautiful, at the border where beauty tolerates the sublime." --- Calvin Bedient, Parnassus

"Magnificently intricate...Tory Dent's book of poems is about much more than AIDS. This is a complex, bold work not afraid to be cerebral (makes your brain sweat)... that challenges the way this disease -- born of, surrounded and perpetuated by silence -- is represented" -- Gabrielle Glancy, Poetry Flash

"Some of the most exciting new verse anyone's written in a very long time. We are reading the construction of a life force in all its glory...the bigness of her imagery is matched by an emotional gigantism throughout that sustains the immensity of the threat she's experiencing." -- Eileen Myles, Denver Quarterly

"Verbosity and passion mark Dent's collection of poems. The poems roll out of their language and rhythms, and what seems to matter is that rolling force...it's a language machine. These poems follow the criss-crossing path over the line dividing life and death. Dante may be the closest analogue since he, like this speaker, had a guide and spoke of a personal crisis...yet this guide knows no more than the poet...this guide offers no consolation." -- Nora Mitchell and Emily Skoler, New England Review