"If the Girl Never Learns, she is never going to learn the hard way! She goes down swinging. And singing. Silverman has given us poems of both heart-stopping descent and dissent. Like some granddaughter of 'Lady Lazarus, ' this ruthlessly crafted collection--as sharp and shiny in its sounds, propulsive rhythms, and wordplay as a blade--knows how to perform. It holds its dazzled reader spellbound."

--Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City, National Book Award Finalist

"Pocked with rage and trembling, the landscape here is nightmared with the distorted mirrors of carousel rides and sedatives, Bosch paintings and seedy motels. In these terse, jagged lines is a girl who chooses her own adventure from a rigged and broken game. Reader, this is the place to go in search of the kind of understanding that can only come with the raw truth."

--Nickole Brown, Sister and Fanny Says

"With every iteration of 'if the girl, ' we are taken deeper and deeper into one girl's life--every woman's life. Silverman asks, 'How does she go on?'--and it's the power of her art that each poem propels us ever forward into those nether regions of loss, of near connections and near misses, while somehow miraculously holding her readers in the most graceful and tenuous net above the dark abyss. These poems arrive with the force of revelation in the eternal ache of searching for love."

--Robert Vivian, Immortal Soft-Spoke