Bath

A poetry chapbook from Driftwood Press.

An excerpt from Bath in Ploughshares

An excerpt from Bath in The Baffler

An excerpt from Bath in Sundress

Praise for Bath:

Jen Silverman’s poems are baptisms of desire. They’ve traveled the world and come back to tell you the pleasure to be found there, the holes of each leaving, the way it is all ‘drenched in light and wine.’ Economical in syntax and generous in image, Bath astonishes at every turn with its heart, its wisdom, its waters. 

– Traci Brimhall, author of our lady of the ruins

  I have a crush on Jen Silverman’s language. This multi-hyphenate wordsmith writes poetry that sings with silver fish scales, bathes in love, hopes for redemption. I’ll read with ardor anything Silverman writes, in any genre. 

– Sarah Ruhl, playwright of Eurydice

 Jen Silverman’s Bath moves through you like 'a weather system/ of love.' In its wake, you will rise from the storm cellar of these poems, squint at the sun, and marvel at how fresh the air seems and how it buzzes with hope. 

– Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete

 The stunning poems in Bath have a tactile palpability—all of the senses are involved—and they are controlled by a voice that is wise, humane and passionate.  I have not read a book in years where the speaker is so reliable.  Nor have I read a poet so imaginative—with phrases such as “coffee thick and sheer”; “quiver like a fugitive” and the hilariously memorable: “The Devil says we can only talk about religion and politics,/unless anyone wants to discuss what it was like to date me.”  The central image, of water, unifies the collection and expands the lives of those encountered, and the places lived.  Wry and ingenious, Bath is a book of pleasure, power and surprise.  

— John Skoyles, Poetry Editor of Ploughshares

A work of bracing intelligence and charisma, Bath is an original and beautifully observed book, a series of immersions in the fluid truths of human encounter. Jen Silverman’s poems have the authority of deep attention and bodily engagement with life, moving as they do between interior and exterior landscapes, between the textures of lived emotion and the precisely calibrated details of a world that is “clear-edged and merciless.” With surprising candor and an inspired sense of play, Bath navigates fluently between the surface and the depths. These are passionate, lucid, wise, and funny poems.

— Jenny George, author of The Dream of Reason

 To read the poems of Bath by Jen Silverman is to feel that one is sitting, sharing a glass of wine with an intimate, erudite friend who is as verbally capacious as she is reflective and self-aware. The “baths” of which the collection speaks are ablutions and dissolutions, and while the poems are haunted by various oblivions (“gonna die/gonna die”) they reclaim the world over and over again with a startlingly original attention to specific, enlivening objects, experiences, interruptions that make the poems vibrate with aliveness. Zooming in, zooming out, juxtaposing the grand ideas of poetry with the nitty-gritty stuff of everyday joy and regret, the poems ring true over and over again.

—Rebecca Lindenberg, author of Love, An Index

Bath is a journey of relationships ending and going, of water and dust, of the containers that hold us and release us. With stunning syntax and captivating characterizations of times and places as well as people, Silverman considers the redemption and purity that humanity aspires to, and ultimately explores what it is to be submerged in it all.

— Lillie Gardner for PANK 

[This] tiny book was the exact thing I didn’t know I needed to read. … The collection is somehow at once sinister and innocent, purifying and full of residue.

— Linda Michel-Cassidy for Tupelo Quarterly

 Silverman writes with the awareness of someone who, having once resisted it, allows their vulnerabilities to bring them into a state of wakefulness. Each location, each moment of casual intimacy is written down with the heightened attention we give to our surroundings when we sense that loss is near. Elegant and bravely tender, Bath reminds us what we gain by letting love in and letting love leave us; how, each time we do, 'our language grows.

— Nico Amador, author of Flower Wars