Anne-Marie Turza's formidable debut collection presents a landscape where anything might appear, out of myth, history, or science: microscopic creatures, the pitcher Satchel Paige, toothed whales, a man on the back of a snow bear.

These poems test the lyric affinity between silence, imagination, and the material world. Put another way, in The Quiet, spatial and temporal distances can be measured in degrees of silence. Turza writes, "Here one can live at any dark system's edge." The Quiet is sinister and aerial.