Dear Silence

Each poem is a delicate thread woven into a tapestry of human experience. With grace and vulnerability, Esther manages to capture moments in her relationships with people and places that share a thread with all of us.

-Olivia Thomas, MFA, founder & Editor-in-Chief of Hare's Paw literary journal

My favorite kind of poetry is the kind that asks questions, but never gives into the demand for a clear or concise answer. Why say in my dream I was already gone and then tell us where you can be found? Be gone. Be whole in the mystery of what is gone and could or could never return. What Dear Silence does is frame and re-frame those small and persistent questions that always end up defining us. What Sadoff does in that re-framing is pull us closer and closer until we realize that she's had us by the scruff the whole time. All we can do is allow curiosity and repetition and beauty to take us into unexpected places.

-Darren C. Demaree, author of in defense of the goat that continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff

The poems in this collection wisely recognize the world as a series of classrooms wherein we taste the salt of our wounds and do our best to listen and grow. Reading this collection-bolstered by Sadoff's crisp, heartfelt lyricism and energetic play with form-allows us to revisit the lovely, terrifying maelstrom that is education in all its forms, armored this time by the tough lessons we've learned along the way.

-Michael Meyerhofer, author of What To Do If You're Buried Alive