I live in NYC, where there never seems to be any peace or any quiet, and it's perfect for me because I have been here my entire life. But every year I go to Germany to stay with my grandmother and it's different. It's impossibpe to fall asleep there because there is no back up music or honking horns, or racing cars, or shouting teenagers to break that silence and, just as Shelby says in "Silent Streets," I don't like it. Shelby really captures the feeling you get when, all of a sudden there's quiet and you aren't used to it. You don't know how to deal with it and you begin to miss that noise. Her poem and the language she uses almost gives you that feeling, without putting you in her place.