Books

Radio Silence (Black Lawrence Press, 2016)

Through vivid and sometimes startling image and music, Radio Silence turns absence into sound. The poems in this new collaborative collection by Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney come up against death and pursue its mysteries: its arrival, its damages, and its meaning for those on the periphery. This is a world where “orange trees rise / from the pockets of the dead, / where we burn / hornet nests and keep / watermelons in the well, / where ghosts have a way / of making themselves / found.”

This is a world that hinges on transitions-young boys crawling in the attic become old men opening wrinkled palms; a sky of magpies becomes a sky of crows. The result is a collection of stripped-down, urgent poems that make no clear boundary between the authors’ identities. From this liminal space emerges a third voice that is both and neither and something in-between. “In the forgetting / dark, we take off our names. We become / something like lightning, cracked bone.”

The Tree With Lights In It (Thrush Press, 2015)

Sample poem:

De Rerum Natura (Gendun Editions, 2011)

  • Winner of the 2011 Merriam-Frontier Award (University of Montana)

  • Out of print, contact to order direct

Sixteen Stories (Flume Press, 2022)

Improvisational. Imaginal. A bestiary of familial revision and dark hope, Sixteen Stories is a collection of poems that challenges our commonplace understanding of narrative, of fable, and the potential healing found in new ways of telling.

Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney have closed their eyes and listened: weathers, dance halls, bright-and-darkening towns...the blaze of certain silences, “flaring ghosts.” Radio Silence is an exquisite dream of transport.

—Joanna Klink, author of Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy and Raptus

In these collaborative emergency poems, Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney remind us that silence doesn’t need to be disconcerting, even “in the chop of a storm/only the future saw coming.” But Radio Silence doesn’t fill in the gaps in transmission. Instead it attends to what emerges from those gaps when one really listens: Silence becomes noise; noise becomes music; music becomes a message—an old friend saying the perfect next thing. “There is the giving and the taking and the taking/back,” but what’s more there is what’s left over in the wake of disappearance, the afterglow of vanishment, the haunted present moment. These poems crackle with the notion that we are never alone, if we can only allow ourselves to pay attention (and participate!) with imagination and faith, in awe of the darkness and light that surrounds us.

—Matt Hart, author of Debacle Debacle and Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless

Smoke Tones (Phantom Books, 2015)

They say Texas is its own country, and it may be so, but its alien, elk-horned brother in the North—Montana—is all swoon and beer and line dancing with mountain goats. A country before the country, a state of cosmic silence, it speaks from the third voice. These poems are intended to be emblems of such a whirlpool.

This collaboration is homage not just to any Montana, nor to any “we,” but to landscapes and peoplescapes in overlapping manners as experienced by us. It is the ribboning of our voices that has led us to create such “smoke tones”—as we’re calling them—the floating vapors between conversation and color.

While our individual voices, mannerisms, and flavors poke through from poem to poem in this manuscript, the ultimate energy we inhabit is pluralistic. Each word is as borrowed and bronzed as the mountains around us, these endless piles of ash.

-from “A Note On The Text”

  • Out of print

Note Left Like Silver On The Eyes Of The Dead (Slash Pine Press, 2014)

  • Out of print