Bøger i Jewish Poetry Project serien

What more could I ask for than a chair at your bright yellow table, high as clear skies, pine trees, and the dusty red roofs of Jerusalem.Lori Levy's delicate poems oscillate vividly between the sensation of dayenu-moments, when we feel perfectly whole and at peace -and our craving to experience more: more of this life, again, more of this place, or another place, of another moment. Levy merges nostalgia and carpe diem as she recalls important stations of her journeys between Vermont, Israel, and California. To love means to know well: a person, a place, a specific shade of light at a precise hour of the day, the taste of her mother-in-law's kubeh dish. As we follow Levy's memories of her longings, joys, and loves we are reminded of how we can find permanence in every impermanent moment, savored in the present.

"Michael Dylan Welch once quipped that, 'if haiku is a finger pointing at the moon, senryu is a finger poking you-or someone else-in the ribs.' In his wonderful new collection of senryu and longer poems, Robert Deluty manages to capture both the humor and pathos of these always fraught relationships - parent/child, teacher/student, doctor/patient - as in this senryu: Rose Cohen asking/ her forty-year-old gay son/ if it's a phase. In each of his poems, Deluty delivers what R. H. Blyth called, 'moments of vision into, not the nature of things, but the nature of man...as in a flash of lightning.'"-Ronald W. Pies, M.D., author of The Unmoved Mover and The Levtov Trilogy."Robert Deluty's poetry shows why parents, teachers, and doctors need to be careful, observant, and vigilant about how they process the world. For they give and receive in ways that should help children, students, and patients to grow - to make their lives better for themselves and for us all. With poignancy, humor, and wisdom, Deluty draws out our innermost feelings and thoughts so that we may become truer to ourselves and others."-Joseph L. DeVitis, Ph.D., editor of The Future of American Higher Education: How Today's Public Intellectuals Frame the Debate"Robert Deluty's new book serves up in abundance the keenly observant humor we have come to expect, springing from the inherent comedy of the human condition and viewed invariably through the lens of his tender compassion. Likewise, he empathizes with the vulnerability and grief we encounter in others and ourselves. We are fully human, after all, only in our mixed-up connections with each other. Like the six-year-old in one of Deluty's senryu, who fills in the boxes of a crossword puzzle with tiny hearts, this book inserts love at every opportunity."-George H. Northrup, Ph.D., author of Wave into Wave, Light into Light: Poems and Places

Original poems and illustrations on the weekly Tora portion, drawing on and responding to classic Jewish commentaries.

he swam way out past the shadows cast / by the steel towers of the indifferent gray bridge / shielding the traffic flowing rhythmically back and / forth, far above the little dead lighthouse that stopped working long / ago when there was nothing left down there / that anyone still wanted to see.Pinny Bulman's poems chronicle his coming of age as a young religious Jewish man against the backdrop of the Dominican and Puerto Rican culture in Washington Heights - two worlds that co-exist but rarely overlap. As he moves beyond the past while holding on to it, Bulman creates the presence of people, prayers, and places long gone, in the same way "time could turn loss into patina." Bulman's precise language allows him to conjure up poignant moments without running the risk of becoming overtly sentimental: but in the end when things melt / what we're left with are these carved out spaces / each with its own beauty of absence

"The greatest poet of the Holocaust" - The New York TimesAvrom Sutzkever (1913-2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet, a freedom fighter, and a witness in the Nuremberg trials. His epic poem Ode to the Dove is now available in English for the first time in its entirety, translated by Zackary Sholem Berger, with illustrations by Liora Ostroff.Sutzkever's visionary imagery moves from the past to the future, from Dante to Chagall, from the streets that stone themselves to the Reed Sea. He seeks the dove compelling him to write, wishing to feed her silver syllables. But what happens at the end of world-spanning travels, when the poet and the dove finally meet?

"Shabbat arrives as usual,dressed in silkwith her hair and make-upbeautifully arranged."So begins The Sabbath Bee by Wilhelmina Gottschalk, which updates the millenia-old genre of Jewish Sabbath poetry for today's world."Torah, say our sages, has seventy faces. As these prose poems reveal, so too does Shabbat. Here we meet Shabbat as familiar housemate, as the child whose presence transforms a family (sometimes in ways that outsiders can't understand), as a spreading tree, as an annoying friend who insists on being celebrated, as a child throwing water balloons, as a woman, as a man, as a bee, as the ocean… Through the lens of these deft, surprising, moving prose poems, all seventy of Shabbat's faces shine."Rachel Barenblat, author, The Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah and Texts to the Holy

"The story of Tirzah Persephone Horowitz's, the brown-skinned, Jewish descendant of "the plantation and the shtetl," as she travels to Israel's holy city of Tzfat and discovers monsters"--

These are poems from when I walked about Shanghai and thought about the meaning of the Holocaust. Why did I think about the meaning of the Holocaust? That is answered by what brought me to China in the first place. What brought me to China? Only the encounter with the plain reality that in the West the Nazis really won, under a hundred different names. Theirs was not a unitary thought. Gathering my own thoughts in a unity, I came to the conclusion that it does not matter if they won or not. No evil had been done except if we forget the evil. Why do we forget the evil? Because if I forget the evil which is at the roots of my life, it is easier to think that the temporary pleasures and worries that my life is filled with, are important. So that I can go and love myself, and not like other people, under a hundred different names, forgetting the simple meaning of the one name I was born with: Human. To be human is to have inherited the Holocaust; and to pretend this does not matter, is to prefer the inheritance of something other than humanity to be my innate name."Ilya Gutner's endeavor is to confront the enormity of the world, whose past, present and future saturate and overwhelm his poetic consciousness. To read these poems is to be in the company of a human being who continues to take humanity seriously, and lives by the heroic principle of sacrifice: each of his poems is a moral act, an exertion, and a selfless offering that hopes but to propitiate the truth. Gutner's sympathies are deeply humane, generous and courteous to his reader as interlocutor; there is much for us to cherish in his gift, and much to be consoled by on these pages, in our own moments of perplexity and inner wrestling."- Anna Razumnaya, author of Under the Sign of Contradiction: Mandelstam and the Politics of Memory"These are quirky, unashamedly monotheist and reactionary poems, not afraid to imagine the Lord in exile in China and developing a taste for pork buns for breakfast after thirty years. Not for the faint of heart, but definitely for those who are not heartless."- Atar Hadari, author of Rembrandt's Bible, translator of Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik (Syracuse University Press) "In Walking Triptychs everyone is an outcast and God bullied into exile. In this beautiful and witty collection of poems, Ilya Gutner loafs around the shadowy streets of China and meets those who haven't forgotten the evil, the humans who know the importance of liking other humans." - Alexandros Plasatis, author of Made by Sea and Wood, in Darkness: a novel in stories and editor of the other side of hope: journeys in refugee and immigrant literature

At once accessible and lyrical, the poems of David Curzon represent a spiritual imagination in the broadest sense of the term. The ninety poems in this collection are special for their autobiographical themes-a youth in Australia, spiritual wanderings in India, and adoption of New York City as home-but also