ANTE TI SE ARRODILLA MI SILENCIO
First Edition: 2013
Published by:
Kodama Cartonera
Tijuana, B.C., Mexico
Second Edition: 2020
Published by:
Triana Editorial
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Language: Spanish
ISBN 978-987-45690-5-9
20 x 14 cm, 80 pp.
Amid sighs, howls, and ellipses, the poems in Before You Kneels My Silence speak absence and longing. Rooted in Jewish mysticism and varying literary references—among them, Plath, Lispector, and sacred Hebrew texts—Jacob Steinberg takes the signs he encounters in his day-to-day life and builds constellations from them, always looking to communicate, whether that be with God, the trees, or an absent ex-lover.
Originally published in a cardboard edition in Mexico in 2013, this new edition also includes the chapbook Your Eyes Saw My Unformed Limbs and other poems previously unpublished in Spanish.
REVIEWS
"Within an absolutely concrete framework, the author of this book sketches those intangible things in our daily lives. Following a fantastic tradition in American literature, Jacob Steinberg enters the greatest of mysteries through the most mundane elements of day-to-day life. He makes it such that a phone call, a trip to synagogue, or a dropped thermometer and the ensuing mercury spillage become allegories for immense celestial questions. Never before like now… has a text shown for me—in a simultaneous way, too—[its author’s] presence in and absence from this world."
—Mario Bellatin, author of Beauty Salon and Jacob the Mutant
"We've all experienced the pain this book refers to, having a broken heart. Though we haven't all managed to write such intense poems. Because when hearts break, strange substances get released in the air. And what is poetry is not those strange substances traveling through the ether? Or traveling through the streets and modes of public transit affecting people without them realizing. If I had to say what this book is about I'd say bravery. The bravery of investigating every possible weapon in the realms of pain, its forces, its atmospheres, and emerging successful and triumphant, transforming them into something else called art."
—Cecilia Pavón, author of A Hotel With My Name and Every Painting I Ever Threw Away