In this collection of poems and images, Cat Weaver, Ken Silvestri, and Natasha Rabin explore the enchantment trains can bring. Trains share in the big and small events of people's lives, and remembered moments in them are depicted here as haunting, bittersweet, quietly nostalgic, and gently comic.

Train Romance is a breathtaking book of poetry in which three poets have wedded a love of trains with their different poetic styles and a shared sense of rushing through space on a journey that may change one's life.

In Praise of TRAIN ROMANCE

In this amazing book by Ken Silvestri, Natasha Rabin, and Cat Weaver, we are brought into their individual worlds and their unique fascination with trains. Ken Silvestri's photographs add another artistic dimension that allows us to see trains with new eyes. I love the entire book with its powerful, evocative poems and the sharply detailed photographs, and I am grateful to these three poets and artists who have reminded me of the longing that trains so often inspire.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Poet, American Book Award for All That Lies Between Us

The universal experience of train travel is captured with nostalgia, humor, sadness and exquisite detail in Train Romance.  Anyone who has ever leaned their forehead against the cool glass of a rushing train as it rolls through a lonely countryside, will smile in recognition at this lovely collection. 

Vince McKewin

Screenwriter, The Replacements and Fly Away Home

This beautifully evocative book ignited long lost memories of emigrating to LA as a little boy with my parents, riding on the Super Chief with its Pleasure Dome observation deck. Long days in a world of its own. Chugging through consciousness, the hopeful imagery of this book delivers us to an experience of the world that is full of sensation. Heartfelt elegies for a way of life, whistling, rumbling, gliding, clattering, whooshing through our minds. Reflecting back at us a form of past and perhaps future civilization.

Stephen Nachmanovitch                                                                                     

Author, The Art of Is and Free Play

Like the trains they take as subject, the poems in this collection carry the reader along a journey.  The scenery changes, characters come and go.  From Ken Silvestri’s nostalgia for a train-rich childhood, Natasha Rabin’s world travels, and Cat Weaver’s excursion into literature (imagining Anna Karenina dressing for her fateful encounter with a locomotive) trains appear in a variety of functions and facets.  Like an actual train journey, these poems leave us changed and enriched by the experience.

Alison Stone

Poet, ZOMBIES at the Disco, Caught in the Myth and Dazzle

If you have ever felt the lure, mystery and haunting seduction of trains, then Train Romance is a book that is a necessary addition to your bookshelf.  Ken Silvestri, Natasha Rabin and Cat Weaver each contributed individual poems in strong distinctive voices that add power to this engaging and evocative manuscript.  And the photographs by Ken Silvestri are memorable.  Order your ticket for a journey that is Train Romance – a book you’ll read again and again.

Laura Boss (1938-2021)  

Poet, The Best Lover and Family Business; Founder & Editor of Lips Magazine

These evocative poems capture a variety of train-related memories and meditation – sometimes movingly, sometimes humorously, always vividly. Their range is wide: from Sloatsburg and Hoboken to Russia and China; from holding a baby in one’s arms to imagining Anna Karenina’s suicide.  They are sure to bring back some train rides of your own and perhaps even inspire you to set them down in prose or –even better—verse.

Richard A. Davison, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus of English, University of Delaware

KEN SILVESTRI was raised in Paterson, New Jersey where the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Maria Mazziotti Gillan found their way through the industrial cracks. Three major railroads and seven stations provided an endless multitude of locomotive sounds. His poems have been published in the Paterson Literary Review, The Great Falls Anthology and LIPS. In addition to writing poems inhabited by trains, Ken can't remember when he didn't photograph all the railroad stations, train tracks and speeding railroad cars he encountered. Ken received his doctorate in Family Studies at Columbia University and is a practicing psychotherapist and certified classical homeopath. His book, A Wider Lens: How to See Your Life Differently, was released in 2018. His chapbook, Legacy Poems is currently available as an e-book. He can be contacted via his website at: drkennethsilvestri.com.

Dr. CAROLE WEAVER aka CAT WEAVER was the first to write a poem for this collection.  Her "Train Romance" is the opening poem and the inspiration for it's title. Cat's Preface and Bio in the book provide some small insight into an extremely and diversely talented woman, who left us all far too soon on 25 March 2022.  She remains ever part of this journey and ever missed by those who were fortunate to know her.

Cat/Carole Weaver: motivational speaker [How Art Heals]; author [Side Effects:The Art of Surviving Cancer and Pies to Die For]; fund-raiser [over $50 million for various non-profits]; and former college professor [Iona College and University of Maryland]. With a doctorate in English and years of teaching the American Military in Europe, her well-travelled heart always had a chamber for the poetry of trains. But when Ken Silvestri and Natasha Rabin invited her to an exhibit of photographs and poetry on the subject, the portal to Train Romance opened.  She is grateful to these partners for getting her on track with their generosity, talent and inspiration.

NATASHA RABIN wrote her first poem in the third grade. That muse has visited her  often, while leaving room for her children's book, Year of the Cat, to come into being, and for paintiing and collage to take precedence intermittently since purchasing her    first set of watercolors in Kyoto, Japan. Having worked in the film industry for many years and thrived on the collaborative nature of that artistic medium, Train Romance  has been a gift of deep collaboration with her co-poets, Cat & Ken [dear friend and life partner, respectively]. She is the recipient of two Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, the first for her poem "Back to the Future", which appears in this volume and can be found in the Paterson Literary Review, Issue 47. Natasha is currently working on Like a Work of Art, a book of haiku that she also plans to illustrate.