Now you can join the others

Author: Taije Silverman

Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (2022)

Now You Can Join the Others, the second collection of poetry by Taije Silverman, traces the absurdities of desire, the shifting nature of grief, and the concentric circles of history and myth that ripple around motherhood and marriage. Set in cities around the world and on real and metaphorical islands, narratives slip between centuries and spaces: a Philadelphia bedroom and Berlin’s Jewish Museum, a castle in Naples and a Chuck E. Cheese. Scenes of sexual and racial violence force an interrogation of words through a multiplicity of voices, and the othering of self becomes a shared, even reassuring alienation. From a sixteenth-century philosopher to a lecherous innkeeper in Modena, from the founding of Athens to the hatching of cicadas, this book investigates human, geological, and cyclical forms of time, suggesting that they are as material and evasive as language. Intricate, unexpected, and probing, Now You Can Join the Others is a radically candid, revelatory collection.

“The poems . . . are heartbreaking in their beauty, the depths of emotion seemingly endless, yet elegantly contained in the poet’s precise language, her haunting imagery. Silverman confronts loss with remarkable tenderness.”

–Natasha Trethewey

“Burning with memory, Taije Silverman’s Now You Can Join the Others is language possessed by grief and secret sight. Radiant, exact, porous. Frank and sinuous. This book is an astonishment of pages struck through with the acheful blessing of love, strange and trembling with time.”

–Aracelis Girmay

“Now You Can Join the Others is a book of appetite, seeking, and transformation. Flooded with wild and convincing metaphor, the poems investigate forgiveness, memory, time, and desire; they are also preoccupied with democracy and its endangerment, love and its recombinations. In Taije Silverman’s world, absence has hair and tells stories, the body is a jar of hours, branches are epiphanies. The speaker of these dazzling poems is deeply human, and full of contradiction and compassion, a voice that presses the reader on, as in a story where both protagonist and reader find themselves caught between if and then.”

–Catherine Barnett