Overview

Beginning with a wagon's tumultuous crossing through the Rocky Mountains, Fluent in Silence startles readers awake to the surreal and unspoken. This debut chapbook is Jayne Shore's reckoning with languages lost, a mother tongue abandoned, and her grandmother's sudden decline, as she works to revise the scripts she's inherited about womanhood. ""Once the map was wrong / about me, I could be anything,"" Shore writes, ""even lonely in the night, / even safe in the dark.""

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Reviews

Jayne Shore's poems traverse the jagged landscapes between childhood and adulthood. She searches for identity in a dreamlike world both beautiful and dangerous, populated by adults who wish to sculpt her to their will. ""I was called a doll. I watched other dolls. / They did not speak,"" she writes. ""I became fluent / in silence, the most respected / noise."" Fluent in Silence is an unforgettable debut book from a brave, dazzling poet who teaches us new ways to find beauty in our broken places. -Rebecca Jamieson, author of The Body of All Things (Finishing Line Press, 2017) With deft restraint & powerful, elegant imagery, Jayne Shore's debut chapbook asks readers to consider what it means to become fluent / in silence, the most respected // noise. From ice skating rink to nursing home, Shore considers identity & ""truth"" as a Korean American woman. These poems ask important questions without demanding answers. Each poem in this collection aches us into the complex legacies of memory, grief & matrilineage in diaspora even as we long for a place where we may feel at home, a place to be fully ourselves. After all, what butterflies stay / on battlefields? -Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia Press, 2024) Haunting, incandescent, and full of teeth, this collection is a stunner. -Joy Sullivan, author of Instructions for Traveling West (Dial Press, 2024)

Author Information

Jayne Shore grew up at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and now lives in Minneapolis with her family. She began telling the stories of scientists and inventors, writing for outlets such as Popular Science, Mashable, Psychology Today, and STAT News, before writing and publishing poetry in journals including the Indianapolis Review.

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