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Signed copies will be mailed by June 15, 2026. To order directly from Finishing Line Press, click here.
In this chapbook, Jayne Shore reckons with languages lost, a mother tongue abandoned, and her grandmother’s sudden decline, as she works to revise the scripts she’s inherited about womanhood. “Once the map was wrong about me, I could be anything,” Shore writes, “even lonely in the night, even safe in the dark.”
“Jayne Shore’s poems traverse the jagged landscapes between childhood and adulthood. She searches for identity in a dreamlike world both beautiful and dangerous, populated by adults who wish to sculpt her to their will. “I was called a doll. I watched other dolls. / They did not speak,” she writes. “I became fluent / in silence, the most respected / noise.” Fluent in Silence is an unforgettable debut book from a brave, dazzling poet who teaches us new ways to find beauty in our broken places.”
–Rebecca Jamieson, author of The Body of All Things (Finishing Line Press, 2017)
“With deft restraint & powerful, elegant imagery, Jayne Shore’s debut chapbook asks readers to consider what it means to become fluent / in silence, the most respected // noise. From ice skating rink to nursing home, Shore considers identity & “truth” as a Korean American woman. These poems ask important questions without demanding answers. Each poem in this collection aches us into the complex legacies of memory, grief & matrilineage in diaspora even as we long for a place where we may feel at home, a place to be fully ourselves. After all, what butterflies stay / on battlefields?”
–Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia Press, 2024)