Radio Silence

By Avery Arbegast

Radio Silence is not a collection about healing.

It is a collection about what remains when healing never arrives.

Across these poems, love is dissected until it resembles theology, ambition is tried like a criminal, language itself becomes both refuge and punishment, and survival is revealed to be less a triumph than an occupation. Lovers become false gods, cities surrender long before their gates are breached, wolves abandon shepherds they adore, rivers are devoured one unnoticed bite at a time, and victories are exposed as little more than carefully worded misunderstandings. Every poem inhabits its own mythology, asking the reader not merely to observe its symbols, but to interrogate them.

Written over years of obsession, discipline, and relentless revision, Radio Silence rejects the notion that beauty is born of inspiration alone. Instead, it asks what language costs when it is forged from necessity rather than leisure, when writing ceases to be an art and becomes the only means by which a life may continue.

These are not poems that seek comfort. They offer no promises of redemption, no tidy conclusions, and no assurance that perseverance is rewarded. They concern themselves with quieter devastations: the exhaustion of proving one's worth, the grief of being wholly known, the violence of ordinary disappointments, and the peculiar loneliness of discovering that excellence cannot purchase belonging.

Radio Silence is, above all else, an argument with the world. It is the record of a mind that refused silence for as long as it could, and the sound it made just before it finally laid down its voice.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HC576FX9
• ISBN13: 9798235724884
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Avery Arbegast
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"