Vocabulary of Silence

Poet Veronica Golos has created a conundrum--a vocabulary of silence that acts as a kind of zen koan for the reader: a negative space, an echo chamber, a mirror. Witnessing from afar the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan conducted by the country in which she lives, the poet also witnesses herself, and struggles to find words to carry the weight of her felt responsibility. Ms. Golos then empties her beautifully wrought poems into the vast silence, filling it with the names of the dead and the living.

"It's a difficult thing to write about war - especially so the one you're not really in, not in the dirty part. Poet Veronica Golos takes the fragments, the bits and pieces that reach us from the battlefield, and weaves them with a morality and a sorrow, to make us understand both our helplessness and our responsibility. Vocabulary of Silence finds the cracks in our liberal armor and helps us field our own shame."
- Barbara Nimri Aziz, author, Swimming Up the Tigris - Encounters with Iraq; Founder, RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers)

"Language fails. Eden in ruin. Golos is a serious poet, luminous and brave. She watches our ghosts. Her poetry is wild in walled spaces, tunnels through which much comes: Iraq and American, Israel and Palestine, silence and shouting, war and prayer, light and violence, Mexico and New Mexico, the current news of the day and the essential news of the past and future. Golos is a poet who tells us both who we are and why we are. In her powerfully realized poems, she speaks of an immeasurable emptiness that could destroy us - or, perhaps, save us."
- Angelo Verga, author, In Praise for What Remains; Curator, Cornelia St. Cafe Reading Series, NYC