The Rest is Silence

About the Book

This eclectic selection of poems straddles decades, generations and continents and constitutes the stories collected by the author over a lifetime. The works reflect on the human condition, what the oral historian Studs Terkel called “life and its uncertainties, ” love’s exuberance and sad needs, birth’s joy and death’s dark wounds, the comedy of communal days and the wearying tears of isolating night. Its language seeks to plummet the power of the communicated word, the fragility of understanding, and the frustrations of muteness.

About the Author

Frances Garrett Connell is a former Peace Corps volunteer. She did her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University on the Afhgan village of Tashkurghan and its uses of literacy, The Authoring of Selves: Literacy and its Indigenous Forms in a Traditional Afghan Village. She has published a volume of poetry, (The Rest is Silence) and a novel (Down Rivers of Windfall Night) with Xlibris, as well as four books as part of her own oral history press, ARS (A Reminiscence Sing.), several dozen pieces in ssmall magazines and association publications. She has never returned to Afghanistan, but three sons and a husband keep her memories alive, teach her the meaning of time and of love, and nurture her desire to hear, heed and pass on the stories.