Barry Silesky

THE WONDER BIBLE

The voice is music you can’t resist, it keeps
calling in notes that dive like blood through our veins;
these are the rules that keep teaching us in stories,
running deeper than everything that makes us who we
are. The men who are walking these stories are our
brothers and fathers, hauling everything you want to
be. Each page is another view of the land we’re trying
to find and the houses that are built on it. Each room is
another instruction, part of a certain map we spend our
lives reading. On the one hand, the rules it leaves are
what I pick up and read. On the other are the voices,
lost in complicated harmonies that I’m learning anew
every day.

Poet, biographer, and editor Barry Silesky's work includes books of poetry THE NEW TENANTS (1990) and THIS DISEASE (2010), poems in more than 80 magazines and anthologies, and biographies of Ferlinghetti (1990) and John Gardner (2004). Silesky lives in the shadows of Wrigley Field with his wife, fiction writer Sharon Solwitz.