The Horses: New & Selected Poems
“Dynamic, kaleidoscopic, shot through with a thousand faces and voices too real to be characters, Richard Silberg’s work is a Chaucerian pilgrimage to strange and uncannily familiar places—Fremont, the Lower East Side, ‘the humped island of Mind.’The Horsesis a journey that dazzles wherever it goes as Silberg, ‘an ecstatic balding older man / in a striped tee shirt,’ slips into words and finds a way to make them accelerate, plummet, and soar. The goal is a new self, a way to ride out the old isms towards a possible future. The Horses is a deeply serious, wild, and powerful contribution to American letters.”—D. Nurkse “Richard Silberg is a scat cat razzing and jazzing and boom-shika-booming down the page-stage, because as he says in one poem, poetry is ‘not abstract / there’s a catness to the sound.’ He tosses his lines like chicken bones on the table, and in their gnawed-down economy we can divine the sad and marvelous lives of the lesbian stripper witch, of the Jewish mother and the Gorilla woman, of the be-mused boyman learning the way to ‘eat at the world with words’ before it eats him and becomes itself ghost world lost in goneness. These poems are timeriffs and deathrants and they are written with a profound humanity, and with a ‘crying so deep / it was like coming / bitter crying / crying sweet like milk.’”—Tony Barnstone