It’s been said that a book of poetry is like a cave, filled with surprises for the curious reader. PROXIES is such a book.

In it, curious reader, you will find a new form of poetry, the haikumo, modeled on the haiku, but with a larger canvas. A mini-epic, on the other hand, offers a socio-political slam by means of a compact take on past epics. Or, you may visit aspects of France and China and rural Arkansas, reimagine a Renaissance painting, dabble in scientific and philosophic speculation, and return via formal and free verse to aspects of our shared world.

The world is your oyster back where the text waits, eager for you to read, enjoy, and, at times, take issue with the circus of serious and comic poetry Stuart Jay Silverman calls PROXIES.

Forget the spider urging the fly into its parlor—these portals offer ways of being and seeing meant to stimulate, challenge, and enchant the curious reader.

Enter a dog’s life and experience the appetites and concerns of man’s best friend. Go into a garden where a man and a woman talk to and at each other, raking over the past looking for answers. Or take a deep dive into an underwater fantasy that ends in an enigmatic philosophy of existence! Which is not to mention Chinese, Norse, Roman, and many other excursions enabled by these portals.

In these poems, Stuart Jay Silverman enters and invites the reader to join him in exploring the myriad ways the world exists and appears to exist, the real so often indistinguishable from the fantastic, the imagined that can seem too real not to exist.