On Nov 22, 2019, aladetomiwa wrote:
The yes or no answer stuff sounds interesting...

On Mar 4, 2020, The_March_Hare wrote:
Silent Poets Review

I haven’t written a review in a long time, not because there are not good books and mentalism releases out there that deserve a review but because I have been busy with my personal life. I have purchased many great releases this year including Amaze, Deadlock, Looch Pocket Index, Jinxed 2, and many others. Having said that, being a long-time follower and fan of Fraser’s work I decided to take the plunge and purchase Silent Poets.

I’m not ashamed to say that I use The O Force (I learned it from Russ Andrews Release called Destination), The Bold Drawing Duplication, Cat’s Cradle, and other routines of his religiously. I have a tattoo of the Tree of Knowledge on my arm and I frequently use The Bold Drawing Duplication as a spectator as mind reader plot. Nonetheless I was very much anticipating this release of his which promised to be his best work to date. As much as this is going to frustrate Fraser, I think that this release fell very short of all of my expectations. It is very difficult to talk about this release without tipping the method that is repeatedly used in almost every routine but I will do my best.

The first part begins with a shuffling sequence that has a participant hold a deck in their hands, doing an overhand shuffle, peaking a card, and then giving the deck another overhand shuffle to lose the card. This is probably the best thing taught in the book. I genuinely do like this but the problem is that there are better things to do that are already released. With this, there is some...how do I put it... set-up that needs to be done beforehand, the sequence looks controlled, and you have to give them instructions that feel restricting. I like that it can be set-up while delivering your scripting but there is a lot that can go wrong and there are better routines out there on the market. Peter Turner just released a routine on his Jinxed 2 project that allows you to do the same thing, except that you don’t need to set-up the deck beforehand, the cards can genuinely be riffle shuffled, their card is merely thought of from the center of the pack, and the cards can be riffle shuffled afterwards. Peter has shown this video to the people on the Magic Café in its entirety so I encourage everyone to go and watch those videos that Peter posted and compare effects. As magicians, we always must ask ourselves are we releasing material for the sake of releasing it, or is it a genuine improvement on what has already been done. In the case of this shuffling sequence it is not an improvement. If I am doing an impromptu thought of card, I’m doing Peter’s version. Keep in mind that Peter Turner’s release cost me approximately $130 USD and was in video format with PDF supplemental material and Fraser’s book cost me a painful $200 for a PDF and a Book. I'm not complaining about the format because if the book was a goldmine of information it would be well worth it but I did not find it to be...

Let’s move onto his open-prediction effect, which according to the ad copy says, “Imagine an Open Prediction effect with playing cards as clean as the spectator dealing cards face up until they get a feeling to stop. They stop and deal the next card face down then continue to deal the rest of the deck face up, checking all the way through the deal to see if the predicted card has appeared.” Sounds great doesn’t it? To the audience – absolutely... lets just leave it at that... I will not be performing this and I don't think that this is even a logical solution to the problem.

I’m not even going to go into the other effects because I’m so disappointed. Every purchase comes with a PDF (which I read) and a physical copy of the book. I don’t even think that Fraser should bother sending me the physical copy of the book, because I wouldn’t even feel comfortable selling it to another mentalist in order to recoup some of the money. All of the demo-videos where it appears that other magicians are completely fooled, I cannot honestly see how. I genuinely wish I could show each of you what was written and you could ask yourself if that would fool you. Before writing this, I did read some of the material to two of my closest friends to make sure that I wasn’t missing something, and they agreed with me.

Yes, he does some work on some previously known psychological forces but they are not an improvement by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve been doing a color force for a long time (since Banachek's psychological subtleties vol. 1 came out) but I will not be incorporating Fraser’s work into my current routine that uses a color force. This is the first time where I have paid that much money for a book that I could not even pull a single subtlety, perhaps a single line from that genuinely improved what I was already doing as a performer. It’s never a good sign when you have to tell the participant afterwards that they may, “unravel the illusion for everyone else”, so don’t tell anyone anything, particularly when you are a close-up performer and its worse when this is the outcome for most of the routines in the book. I know that there will be a backlash about this review, as there always is when people are honest, and I genuinely wish no ill towards Fraser, but I regret this purchase.

In full disclosure, I cannot write more than what I have already written on the methods because they are too easy to expose. I might have already exposed too much, I'm not sure. What is evident is that I read through it as Fraser suggested and around every twist and turn was waiting for it to come to the stuff that I was going to use but it never transpired. Fraser's writing style is one where he asks you to read through the book in chronological order without skipping over anything, I think that he should consider chapters because it is brutal for someone to have to read through 240 pages just to get to the routinens that they will perform. Other performers have written like this too but I think that Fraser riterates himself too much and could easily condense what he has written to far less pages.

I was really looking forward to this purchase because I thought that it would be superior to all past releases, but I liked Book of Angels and Book of the Fallen way more. This simply depressed me about purchasing any further books in the future. I think that I have invested too much money in material that I have not learned from and I can’t do it anymore. I will just stick to material from trusted sources that I have always gotten a lot out of. As I said at the beginning of this release, I loved Peter Turner’s Jinxed 2, Escalators, Devil in Disguise 2, and I loved Amaze, Deadlock, and the Looch Pocket Index – all of which cost less than this book.

The reason that I chose to write this review was simply that mentalism is a business, a market place, and I think that people should invest their money in material that they are actually going to use. I understand that not all material is for all people but there comes a point when we have to recongnize that the material might not be as good as we would like to believe that it is. Due to my love for Fraser as a person and his past material, I wanted to sugar coat this review but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. This was $200 out of my pocket that I cannot get back and it put a distaste in my mouth for buying future releases.

With Sincere Regret,

The March Hare

On Sep 13, 2020, luiscubanmentalist wrote:
I have been just an observer at The Magic Café for about 19 years now and just recently decided to start interacting. This is mostly because I hate the back and forth that can occur in forums and chat rooms. However, I felt the need address something said on this thread.

Someone mentioned that the material wouldn't fool him or his magician friends and I am scratching my head as to why that even matters. Just because you are aware of the multitude of effects and methods on the market today doesn't mean that the lay people you are performing for have any clue as to what you are doing.

On Apr 2, 2020, aladetomiwa wrote:
If anyone is interested in buying my copy(Unopened)
Pm me

On May 28, 2021, quantum_swami wrote:
I expect if this book was priced at $25 for example, he'd shift hundreds, possibly even thousands.