Pub­lisher: CavanKerry Press
Price: $16.00
For­mat: Paper
ISBN: 1−56859−163−2
To buy: UPNE, IndieBound, Powell’s, Ama­zon, Barnes & Noble

Read reviews of The Silence Of Men

Con­tact me with ques­tions about The Silence Of Men.

We all know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I have to tell you about the cover of The Silence Of Men, which was painted by CavanKerry Press’ designer, Peter Cusack. I’d sent Peter a whole slew of images as pos­si­ble cover art, some of them con­nected quite explic­itly to the ideas of men and silence, some more focused on silence and some that were so abstract that they would only have worked to the degree that the viewer was will­ing to con­nect the book’s title to the shape(s) and flow and mood of the image. Mean­while, as part of prepar­ing to design the book, Peter had asked me to send him some poems so he could get a sense of what the book was about. When he was done read­ing them, in response, he painted the pic­ture that became the book’s cover. When he sent me a dig­i­tal ver­sion of the image, I was imme­di­ately struck by how pro­foundly “right” it felt: that it should be flow­ers rep­re­sent­ing that which silences the man in the pic­ture by cov­er­ing his mouth and that the flow­ers them­selves, the silence of their exis­tence, could also be read as that which is com­ing out of the man’s mouth. When I saw the actual paint­ing, at a read­ing given by another CavanKerry Press author, I was, for a moment, speech­less. The col­ors were so much richer than the dig­i­tal copy, the (simul­ta­ne­ously dis­turb­ing and opti­mistic) beauty of the image so much more present — I had no choice. I bought the paint­ing, and I am very proud to say that it now hangs on my liv­ing room wall.

Sam­ple Poems

Here are some of the poems I gave Peter to read.

The Silence Of Men

A man I’ve never dreamed before walks
into my apart­ment and sits in the green
chair where I do my writ­ing. He car­ries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he places silently on the floor.
The phal­lus begins to waltz to music
I can­not hear, its scro­tum a skirt;
its tes­ti­cles, legs cut off at the knees.

I want to know why this dis­fig­ured
man­hood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, deflat­ing
in short spasms like an old man cough­ing,
spreads itself in a pool of shal­low blood.
The silence between us is the silence of men.

Light

In the dream, my life was smoke: I couldn’t breathe.
So I ran, unwrap­ping myself down the beach
till your skin, the ocean, lapped at my knees.
I dove in. Your voice was a cur­rent,
a melody gath­er­ing words to itself
for us to sing, and we sang them,
and they swirled around us, iri­des­cent fish
bring­ing light to the world you were for me;

and then I was water, a river
wash­ing the night from your flesh,
and I cra­dled your body ris­ing in me
till you were clean, glow­ing,
and when you sur­faced, glis­ten­ing,
there was not an inch of you I didn’t cling to.

Who Knew?

I’m wait­ing for the tears that didn’t come
when they put him in the ground, that wouldn’t come
among the fam­ily friends and rel­a­tives
who later came to mourn. The small talk
they made of other deaths to make their own
small­ness less appar­ent made my brother’s dying
smaller by the hour. One woman,
lost in a cousin’s can­cer, turned to me
as some­one handy to do what her grief
would not allow her to do, Richard, sweetie,
be a dear, bring me an ash­tray. After lunch,
I recited kad­dish. The same woman
took my arm, That was won­der­ful!
Who knew you had such Jew­ish in you?

Dear Yoon

When you went home that night to tell your hus­band
and he took the swing that missed your jaw
and bruised your arm, I wanted you enough
to see that blue-black Rorschach on your flesh
as a gift. Now, behind me on this train,
a mother wor­ries in your lan­guage
that her daugh­ter is too old to find a man.
Ji-in must be six­teen by now, too young
for you to worry yet, and yet the voice
your sis­ter screamed in when she saw my face—
Go! Be a round-eyed’s whore! May your daugh­ter
do the same!—will not have been for­got­ten.
Even all these years later your neigh­bors
will won­der which of them would dare
give their son to such a woman’s offspring.

Last night, the small com­mo­tion of my spilled drink
turned a woman’s face I thought was yours
to where I was sit­ting. If it had been you,
what would I have said?
Remem­ber the beach in Pusan?
We laughed like new­ly­weds, took these pic­tures
I joked our chil­dren would some­day call trea­sures.
I’m look­ing at the one of you on the rock we climbed
to escape the stares that brought back
your talk of sui­cide. You grabbed my hand,
led me to the edge and we stood gaz­ing out
over the water, a future
wait­ing for us to cross it.
Yoon,
you’ll read this only if you read my book.
These lines must end. I have to let you go.

What The Review­ers Have To Say

Newman’s first book-length col­lec­tion, The Silence of Men, explores the space between old-fashioned male silence and con­tem­po­rary male sound and presents poems that force us to rethink the place of poetry in mas­culin­ity studies.

–Fred Gar­daphe, Men and Masculinities

❖

This is a fairly hard vol­ume to read. Not because the poetry is bad: it has moments of epiphany and insight many writ­ers would love to pro­duce, but because the mate­ri­als and themes are so close to the bone.

–William G. Doty, Jour­nal of Men, Mas­culin­i­ties and Spirituality

❖

Super­fi­cially The Silence of Men appears to be a guy book, which is not to imply that women will be turned away. This is not a guy book in the dis­dain­ful way a guy would say a film is a chick flick, but a book that openly por­trays what a man feels and expe­ri­ences […] Ulti­mately New­man shows me a side of ten­der­ness and empa­thy. I am drawn into what this man and many men have gone through to sur­vive in this culture.

–Eve Rifkah, Diner

❖

In many ways, The Silence of Men can be read as a nar­ra­tive. The reader fol­lows the speaker’s jour­ney through a com­pli­cated past and under­stands both how these events have shaped him and how he refuses to let these events con­trol his adult deci­sions. In this debut book, the voice the reader hears is a strong one, singing, despite the hurts and wrongs of the past, an opti­mistic song in which “the earth [can be] trans­formed to a tent where we all break bread” (“Poem from the Barnes & Noble Café”). If the end­ing of silence is also the begin­ning of new sto­ries, I look for­ward to read­ing future books from New­man, to hear­ing what he’ll sing about next.

–Amy Unsworth, The Pedestal

❖

Richard Jef­frey Newman’s work is excep­tional. He expresses human emo­tions in ways pro­found, pow­er­ful, and poignant. In The Silence of Men, he tries “to give the dream a shape this page will hold.” How he gives life to those words tak­ing shape on the page is an enlight­en­ing journey.

Lau­rel John­son, New Works Review

❖

Hugo Schwyzer, in his response to The Silence Of Men, sin­gled out the poem “Coitus Inter­rup­tus” and how it explores “the ways in which racist real­ity both impinges upon — and leaves untouched — white existence.”

❖

THE SILENCE OF MEN is Richard Jef­frey Newman’s first book of poems. I know few peo­ple go to book­stores or Ama­zon to find new poets but he’s worth the effort. The pub­lisher is CavanKerry Press (2006). New­man […] is NOT a silent man, he writes with great depth and insight and ope­ness about the things most men never talk about [.] Poem after poem aston­ishes me.

June Cal­en­dar, Cal­en­dar Pages

❖

Just as I fin­ished read­ing The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006) a new friend con­fided that he’d learned a secret about his father — a secret that shook the foun­da­tion on which he’d built his life. He said he wanted to write about it, but didn’t know where to start. I rec­om­mended [The Silence Of Men].… As I was prepar­ing to post this piece, I received an e-mail from [that] friend. He had this to say: “I LOVE IT!…his abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate feel­ings is pre­cisely what I’m hop­ing to be able to do. It’s great reading.”

Shawn Pit­tard, “An Open Let­ter to Richard Jef­frey New­man” on The Great Amer­i­can Pinup