Speaking in the spaces reserved for silence

Speaking in the Spaces Reserved for Silence is a collection of poems which work to navigate and collect the ephemeral nature of communication. Some poems investigate the ruptures of speech stifled by bursts of overwhelming emotion. Other poems explore the moments in which two people do not share a common language-or other moments in which those who do share a common language still fail to communicate. The manuscript creates what Jean Baudillard calls a "simulated version of reality" or "hyperreality" into which the characters in the poems and the speakers of the poems enter due to the "seduction" of an escape from the seemingly "impossible" nature of human connection through communication. The poems enter this dream-space to find a means of "self-preservation" in order to maneuver through the scattered and sometimes hollow cacophony of sounds to find the connective tissue in what Wallace Stevens, in his essay "Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," explains as "the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."