Do Words Dream Themselves Into Silence Told In Riddles?

Do Words Dream Themselves Into Silence Told In Riddles? is a hybrid poetry and prose collection that builds off of its chapbook predecessor, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It...The Slaughter: A Field Guide for the Hunted & the Hunter, The Dead-Alive, The Live-Dead Ones, The.... (Harbor Editions, 2024), by creating a universe of the strange, dark, bizarre, and uncategorizable. Within its pages, readers experience the sisters of an obscure convent, re-engage the fevered feral, and a faceless visitor who demands that the narrator follow the instructions from a childhood friend who says, You have to say yes. You have to be ready. Go with Him when he comes.

This collection has many parents that range from the psychological unrest of films like Braid (2018), Persona (1966), Westworld (1973 and 2016), and Longlegs (2024) to adventures that happen when our eyes are closed within the dreamscape to the work of artists within the surrealist movement like Leonora Carrington. This prose and poetry collection aims to be as provocative as the nuanced domestic terror that Shirley Jackson unleashes in her exploration of the uncanny.

If books have souls, this one is a seeker that asks the existential human questions:

Where are we going within the real and imagined external and internal landscapes? Within these places, do we ever get there? Did we ever belong?

How do we make sense of the people, places, and things within the interstitial spaces of our bodies, consciousness, and time?

The readers are taken in and out of different worlds while having a choice to navigate the pages in any order they wish, with some hidden sections not presented in the table of contents. Readers also have a surprise concierge who is along for the whole ride.