Arabilis integrates the ordeal of othering into the fundamental uncertainty of life to produce a collection that is honest in its pain, confusion, and joy. Beautiful and desolate as a rural upbringing, these poems delve into the complex relationship between the self and the indifferent world it inhabits. In this cogent work, the lonely thrill of existence is characterized by gunpowder, bone, and Bud Light empties. Presented through the perspective of a person of color adopted into a white family, this collection simultaneously acknowledges the senselessness of life and demands an explanation for it.
Silvieus’ poems advance through the changing of the seasons, paralleling the introspective nature of youth and adulthood alike through an examination of faith, nature, and memory. Sacrilegious discourse is converted to sacred invocations as this collection examines the viscera of life and loss. Belying each poem is a tenacious grasping for answers to questions impossible to express, validating the intuition that though we turn to God, Earth, or another person, we may never receive a fulfilling reply. In the face of this apparent helplessness, these poems continue to stumble in the dark, reaching with the God-want of their hands, relentless in their search for that which might finally reach back.
“Silvieus emerges as a poet of our generation, who invokes the bones of orphans, the mud of moral virtue while suspending disbelief with fiercely accomplished form and language, both ancient and familiar, costly and sustained. A spirit of difficult grace, Arabilis, makes arable the crushing consequence of hope, of split identities and confronts the task of unburying global histories, politics, and faiths to re-open the accumulated wounds of memory. A violent baptism, anointed grief, Silvieus, in every poem, resurrects the bodies of animal, of hunger and cast-off devotion, an incantation that rises from the dead, to claim what was lost and must be regained.”
—E.J. Koh
“The poems speak of a hunger to belong to a landscape and though the landscape does not reject the speaker, there is still the forgetful sky or the ‘drenched volume of our world.’ The palpable loneliness of waiting for grace fills these beautiful poems and yet its epiphanies are not quiet. They emerge along the highways of pass-through towns and gleam in the headlights like the unexpected eyes of a deer. The wisdom of the fields, the rising stems piercing through the undergrowth, the insistence of the seasons— all of it cuts through the din of our cacophonous lives in Leah Silvieus’ marvelous book. These are astounding poems.”
—Oliver de la Paz
“Leah Silvieus is one of the most exciting young poets writing today and Arabilis, a most exciting debut. Silvieus’ subtle music, her graceful line and gift for the finely wrought image, all bring to mind Keats’ dictum that ‘poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity.’ That said, these poems are as singular as they are memorable. And years from now, when readers are singing Silvieus’ praises, I won’t say I told you so, but…”
—John Murillo