Silent Teachers, Remembered Sequel by Hannah Weiner

This book continues Weiner's obsession with formally radical representations of multiple voices that has been central to her work at least since CLAIRVOYANT JOURNAL. The poems here create a broad, sweeping, and tense historical context for understanding how voices have come to her. What this book teaches us is that history--written accounts of people's lives and actions--is always about the struggle for voices. But Weiner has no sentimentality about multiplicity--the many voices of her text are framed by conditions of power, and their desire for it. In such a context, language itself is revealed as a hesitant, embattled, sometimes obscure and always resistant medium. Finally an autobiography, SILENT TEACHERS/REMEMBERED SEQUEL is not a story of triumph, of social conditions overcome by a saving mastery of language. Rather, this book returns its readers to the condition of their own lives and languages, teaching us that listening is something we must learn to do in our own circumstances, however tentatively.
—Mark Wallace