Muskrat Friday Dinner

Muskrat Friday Dinner is an honest exploration of what it takes to live a creative life right now. These poems are wry and thoughtful, shot through with self-deprecating sincerity and an insistent intelligence that is as kind as it is incisive. Silsbe captures the comradery of the drinking life as well as the loneliness. He confronts the challenges of balancing the demands and disappointments of work and love and family across decades and miles with both humor and insight. His is a Pittsburgh where people work hard, laugh long, drink well, and make the best art they can in the time they are allowed.

"There is in these poems the sound of old records, the crackle of the needle riding warped vinyl, the fullness of that delicate, spinning thing. These poems smell of cheap, warm beer and the long-gone smoke from steel mills and cigarettes. Take this book into the next dive bar you walk into and press it into the bartender's closed fist. Watch that fist open up. See the nod of the head, the recognition in these poems of everything that is real and necessary in our world."

— Peter Markus, author of The Fish and the Not Fish