Acts of Love

Author: Edgar Gabriel Silex

Publisher: Curbstone Books (2004)

In his third book of poetry, Edgar Gabriel Silex explores the ways love confronts us. Devastatingly honest, these poems begin with "children transported in confusions of love" and examine relationships within the family and with lovers, and "how our love, for our most precious things, is soiled with our shameful behaviors, by our acceptance of doubt and melancholia." The general movement of the poems is affirmative, traveling from the pain of childhood trauma through understanding to the point where the narrator is able to break the cycle of violence and conclude "we will remember / everything in beauty."