Jesse Lee Kercheval's third collection of poems, Silent Cinema, attempts to capture the art of silent film, a nonverbal feat of gesture and pantomime, in the pure language of poetry. This is a challenging task, but Kercheval has proven herself a poet equal to the task; his last book of poetry, the well-received Dog Angel (2009), managed to synthesize faith, pop culture, tradition, his mother's death, and myriad other topics into a single manuscript. In Silent Cinema, he takes the opposite path, narrowing his attention exclusively to silent cinema, in particular the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and the work of Ivan Mosjoukine. However, readers who enjoyed his first two books will be happy to know that the incisive voice and unadorned images that populate those collections have found a home in this one as well. Like a screenplay, Cinema Muto is divided into three acts, starting with Saving Silence, a one-page manifesto in which Kercheval states the reasons for his choice of subject. “There are as many feet / of dissolving nitrate film / as there are bones / in the catacombs of Paris,” he writes. Then, a few lines later: "So why do I care? Because / my mother was deaf, / because I'm tired after years / of talk-talk-talk." These short lines allow her to exploit enjambement for dramatic effect, a technique that appears throughout the book. In My husband--Lover of Silent Film--Attenss La Giornate del Cinema Muto, for example, he writes "the lights go out / and the screen fills with / deliberate silence, / of black and white gestures / of a lost world ." Line breaks like these keep the reader slightly off-balance, as cuts would in a good movie. Combined with Kercheval's other dominant formal choices (a mobi... half a paper... there's a lot to be said, and while there are occasional moments when passion gets the better of her ("Mosjoukin screams over the panicked rhythm of the horses - / Never be afraid! / I think he's talking to me / I think he knows how terrified I've always been"), the poems never encroach on sentimentality. Part biography and part love letter , the sequence leaves. His reader is entranced by Mosjoukine (his "outstretched arms", his "almost unstoppable body") and curious enough to start ordering DVDs. Sharing his passion was, most likely, one of the goals Kercheval had in writing the book His Affection because silent cinema is omnipresent in the eighty-plus pages of Silent Cinema, and this is what makes it such a compelling read: although there are many well-crafted poetry collections published every year, it's hard to find one that feels so authentic in its detail and feeling.