What Silence Equals
Tory Dent

The “brilliant and challenging” (Library Journal) exploration of living with HIV by the winner of the 1999 James Laughlin Award. First published in 1993, this virtuosic collection defined writing about AIDS for a generation of poets. Chaotic and incantatory, it is a submersion into the railing consciousness of a young woman on the precipice of mortality, its “dazzling and valiant poems...the psalms of our present moment“ (Sharon Olds).

“In searing poem after searing poem, without lessening the tension of giving any kind of relief, Dent describes exactly what it is to be in her skin, in her head...One of the great, necessary books to come out of the AIDS crisis”
—Adrian Oktengberg, The Women's Review of Books

“Tory Dent charts her own waters. She's a poet of brilliance and shadows.”
—Eileen Myles, Denver Quarterly

“These poems are intelligent and alive, emanating not from what the author terms ‘the negative state of my positiveness’ but from the vertiginous cavern's edge: they are not poems about a disease but weather reports from an existential state.”—Ellen Kaufman, Library Journal

Tory Dent (1958-2005) is the author of three volumes of poetry: Black Milk (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005), HIV, Mon Amour (1999), which won the 1999 James Laughlin Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems appeared in such journals as Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies Life Sentences, The Exact Change Yearbook,  and In the Company of My Solitude.

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $17.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-196-5 / 88 pages / Poetry