Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe and NPR
Frank Bidart is a gift–we are lucky to have had him writing poetry for a half century.
Against Silence is his eleventh collection, and continues his lifelong navigation of the uncertain spaces between haunting and love, and the fertile gap between words and the world. –Jonny Diamond,
Lit Hub "
Against Silence is a bold, often painful exploration of regret and mortality . . . When I interviewed Bidart in 2015 for Life of a Poet, he said, 'There is a kind of beast within us that wants to destroy us, and I think people who manage to do what they set out to do have overcome some very profound impulse toward self-destruction.' Few poets have managed to do as much as Bidart. –Ron Charles,
The Washington Post In
Against Silence, [Bidart] seems interested in individual and collective ethics, and sees a threat in silence – both the kind that opposes speech in life and the kind found in death, which we're all up against. His poems float and swerve, at once cinematic and oddly intimate . . . His poems recognize, and help us recognize, the inherent harm in what we hold dear, defend and even worship. –Daisy Fried,
The New York Times Book Review Bidart, like all strong poets, is continually reinventing and rediscovering himself; even at the brink of dissolution he refuses to be silent. –William Doreski,
Harvard Review In
Against Silence, as often in his oeuvre, Frank Bidart gives us a poetics where ethics and sensuality clash and a strange, terrifying awareness of what our species stands for is revealed. –Ilya Kaminsky,
Poetry Daily Our greatest living poet of the flesh . . . The poet and reader keen to censor, ironize, or infantilize their own desires will find in the work of Frank Bidart a half-century-long rebuttal. –Nathan Blansett,
Los Angeles Review of Books Another memorable contribution to Bidart's oeuvre. –
Publishers Weekly
