Where Silence Keeps You

The things we swallow have to live somewhere.

This is the book to read alone, late, with the phone face-down.

At its heart is a long poem that moves like a tide: a woman whose first laugh sounds like the sea and the wind, and who begins to fade even as he drinks from her waters. Around it, the words that stay stuck in the throat and the people who keep slipping out of arm’s reach. He can still feel her berry kiss, and he can’t leave until she sends him away.

Williamson writes as close to silence as language gets, and just as close to skin: a first time on a linoleum floor, knees marked by the rough carpet.

For anyone who has written the letter and never sent it, and for readers of Pablo Neruda’s love poems and Charles Simic.

From the book

But I never leave this room.
The letter stays sealed,
its meaning suspended
between what I wrote
and what you’ll never read.

The edition

88 pages. Collector’s first printing, limited to 50 hand-numbered copies, signed by the author. Cover art and design by the author.

The poetry of Eric Williamson

This Is Our Secret, What Of Us Remains, Where Silence Keeps You, And In Our Absence, and Before We Weren’t Anywhere. Read the titles in order and they follow one love, from the secret, to the empty room, to before any of it began.