Transitional Object

"At once a challenge and an invitation, a seduction and a demand, the work collected in Transitional Object does what poetry must, and only the best poetry does: it undoes the world as I know it, and remakes it entire. Adrian Silbernagel's utterly original voice, his mastery of language, his perceptual power, do no less than de- and re- construct reality. These poems both employ and interrogate the power of word, image, and symbol to say what we mean; they question, and ultimately restore the reader's faith in, the possibility of making meaning at all. If all this sounds abstract, the poems themselves are anything but--these are muscular, embodied, deeply sensate works, alive with the passions of being, rich with both the tensions and wisdom of body and mind. Silbernagel is an important new voice, and his vision is one that we have not yet seen, nor will we see again soon." --Marya Hornbacher 



"Some books create a feeling of gratitude and recognition whose intensity is startling. Transitional Object is one of those. Adrian Silbernagel works language like stained glass, making one densely-pigmented, luminous scene after another. If you too have asked “who this ‘I’ is that steals and gives,” if you have also told yourself, “the life of me/requires so many more bodies than this,” you need Transitional Object.  Let it help you move from one self to another, one moment of being to the next, again and again. It’s that important. Silbernagel has “waded deeper into the rubble” of the structures that oppress, “where [he] now lie[s] in wait” to welcome you and help you on your way." -Jay Besemer



In developmental psychology, transitional objects are objects to which young children develop intense and persistent attachments in unstable situations—a tendency which some psychologists link to the processes of individuation, ego development, the birth of memory, the capacity for empathy and object-relations, the capacity for symbolization, and other formative capacities. In this debut work by Adrian Silbernagel, which can be described as a poetic inquiry into the conditions of personal identity or selfhood, the poems themselves become the objects to which the developing speaker clings as the various components of their identity—their gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, familial relations, and formative relationships—are called into question.