Poetry. It is a truism that a persistent trickle of water carved out the Grand Canyon. In Jono Schneider's first book, this truism can be applied axiomatically where an inexorable flow of words erodes the extraneous to reveal vast muteness. Within this space, narrative traces arise, skirmish, and disappear. Familiarity exerts its own betrayal where "the only promise I can make is the one I will never reveal." "...BUT I COULD NOT SPEAK... occurs in and as a moment, one that it has opened for itself in the midst of a story so that its meanings can emerge...As readers of this wonderful book, our own involvement begins within its exquisite, noticeable sentences...we want nothing better than to pause at each of them, not in aesthetic wonder but so as to participate in the action that is the book"--Lyn Hejinian.