Poetry. Jewish Studies. "The ruins of Lifta, an archeological site of incalculable value outside Jerusalem is a nexus of 'irreconcilable stories.' To the stones of Lifta and their compelling mute testimony, Kaminsky has bent his poet's ear, transcribing for us their urgent, mournful, bitter and aggrieved voices that witness to the layers of memory and history here. As the poet was summoned to Lifta, this probing and timely book summons the reader with blunt, contentious dialogues, daring and tender monologues, striking allegories, and always, the piercing questions that, seemingly unanswerable, must continue to be asked in the pursuit of understanding and justice."--Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Poetry. Jewish Studies. "Marc Kaminsky's A CLEFT IN THE ROCK is a monumental achievement. At home in no world, Kaminsky has an uncanny gift for walking between worlds, traveling like a courier from the personal to the archetypal. I know of no poet whose work, passionate and visceral, inscribes itself so readily in typological time, the perpetual present of Biblical story, psalm, and creation myth. Meticulously grounded--in Yiddishkeit, the maelstrom of the family, wholehearted married love, the struggles of the aging body--these poems open onto absolutes. The chords they strike have extraordinary resonance: a dying father and Moses' encounter with God, a hospital procedure and an interrogation site. Kaminsky visits the depths to find how to 'live / with catastrophe in the world / of signs and wonders.' His book is itself a cleft in the rock, a site of hard-won emotional possibility in a stone-hearted age. These are poems of naked vulnerability and contingency; they remind us what it means to be whole and human."--D. Nurkse

Book by Kaminsky, Marc