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In A Silence of Words, Olivia Dresher's poetic aphorisms and other brevities (taken from her first few years at Twitter beginning in 2009) express her devotion to short forms that she also explored in her book In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing. Ten years later, in 2019, she has a significant following at Twitter and has written over 58,000 tweets, of which 874 appear in this book. As one of her followers noted, “You write as you breathe, shaping everything with some sort of second nature.”
“In A Silence of Words, Olivia Dresher continues to explore her fascination and deft facility with fragments and aphorisms. Taken from their first public home of Twitter, Dresher’s fragments find their way into a reader’s inner consciousness with the intimacy of poetry and the depth of philosophy, offering ‘Awe, not answers.’ If, as she tells us elsewhere, ‘The mind likes being alone, the heart doesn’t,’ this collection delivers at turns solitude and companionship. In the same way that the mind and heart live within one body, so do the nuance and complexity of these short works live within one’s reading experience.”
—José Angel Araguz, author of Until We Are Level Again
“Olivia Dresher has captured in her insomnia the world while it sleeps, and our waking somnambulism. These are observations of a mind permanently awake, gifts of extraordinary thought and feeling that recognize life’s surfaces and depths. It is like we are reading ourselves glimpsing all that she sees and feels, an encounter with the richness and complexity of our daily lives. The simplicity, the ironies, the puzzlement, those Eureka moments we discover about ourselves are all here. Only an author unspeakably alone could demonstrate such kinship with these darkest and most shining moments of human nature, the silences, the screams, and all that is muffled in between. The insights into feelings are so compelling that the reader feels almost uneasy and exposed. The best are as self-complete as only the best aphorisms, epigrams, poems, and simple word play can be.”
—Richard Krause, author of Optical Biases and Eye Exams
338
Loneliness is wanting to share what can’t be shared, wanting to know what can’t be known.
339
I’m the only person who agrees with me.
340
The more practical I’m forced to be,
the more I turn to poetry.
341
Words hiding in trees, in attics, in the smell of late January.
342
Be careful who you choose to love,
for there is no choice.
343
Apologizing to the grass as I cut it.
344
The dog in the car, his head out the window, barking and barking as if existence is too much.
345
When you fall in love with a philosopher, everything is uncertain.
346
The past is the pot the present is cooked in.
347
The past is a watercolor
The present is a waterfall
The future is waterproof
348
If only truth had a heart.
349
Facts are dry soil where only weeds can grow.
Excerpt Copyright © 2019 by Olivia Dresher
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by Olivia Dresher
