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Poetry. Jewish Studies. RENDING THE GARMENT is a narrative tapestry encompassing persona poems, prose poems, flash fiction, imagined meetings with historical figures, ancestral appearances, and ephemera. This series of linked poems explores the life and times of one Jewish family. "RENDING THE GARMENT tells a familiar tale, the Jewish immigrant family romance, but with an important difference: using shifting points of views and narrative interruptions (biographical essays, scolding notes from school Principals, diary entries), not to mention a cast of characters as lively as a borscht belt revue, Willa Schneberg tells her story from the inside, where grief and love live side by side in bed, 'neither old, nor young' bodies outside of time. A fresh, original and moving addition to our literature." Philip Schultz "RENDING THE GARMENT draws us intimately into one family and through them into the world of immigrant Jews born almost a century ago and their lives in America. Willa Schneberg has a fine ear and her poems capture their voices, their cadences, the way they think, mixing Yiddish with English, the old and the new. The people of her poems come alive on the page: irreverant, beautiful, flawed, funny, sad, loving, opinionated, stubborn, real. They embody a wealth of contradictions, perfectly exemplified in these lines that her mother who smoked so glamorously and lost her voice to cancer writes in a notebook near the end of her life, 'I'm Jewish. / There is no God.' I recognize these people and I come to care for them deeply." Ellen Bass "In RENDING THE GARMENT, Willa Schneberg juxtaposes humor and heartbreak, Jewish Brooklyn's cultural/ linguistic referents and post-modernity. Readers hear the iconic, self-mocking conversation of familial bickering and the deep devotion of a daughter charged with helping her parents die 'good' deaths. 'Soon it will be as if language never knew him, ' says one speaker of her father. With precise, unsparing detail, Schneberg's language rewards our journey into the difficult, mortal territory we all share." Robin Becker "In one memorable episode in Willa Schneberg's RENDING THE GARMENT, the author's dying mother sits by the hospital bed of the Israeli poet Abba Kovner. 'Stars don't go out when we die, ' he writes on her notepad. 'Now you're talking, ' she writes in reply. This funny, poignant imagined moment is representative of the moments Schneberg has gathered to create her richly woven memoir in poetry of a loving, contentious Jewish family and the world they lived in of junk men, corset shops, and immigrant ambitions." Lee Sharkey"

Product description Suzanne Roberts was raised in Southern California and studied at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of another poetry collection, "Shameless" (Cherry Grove Collections). She teaches English at Lake Tahoe Community College in South Lake Tahoe, California. About the Author Suzanne Roberts was raised in Southern California and studied at cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of another poetry collection, "Shameless" (Cherry Grove Collections). She teaches English at Lake Tahoe Community College in South Lake Tahoe, California.

In Earthbound, Steve Holt engages the struggle of life in highly charged language, buckling and hawsing, brought to bear on the business of securing and naming experience. His poetry sings of survivors, the dead, mine explosions, that gone girl on the old Virginia coast. The land and its lives are lost and regained here and we hear it all in a tough, melodious music dense and textured as earth. --Richard Hague

About the Author Roger Nash is the author of seven books of poetry. His poetry and short-fiction are widely published across Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.A., and have won numerous awards, including the PEN/O.Henry Prize Story Award and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario, where he is Poet Laureate.

This luminous collection is Maxine Kumin's twelfth volume of poetry, the first since her remarkable memoir, Inside the Halo. Themes of loyalty, longevity, and recovery appear here, along with poems addressing the eminent dead: Wordsworth, Gorki, Rukeyser, and others. "Inescapably, many poems come up out of the earth I live on and tend to," Kumin says.

Product Description The new, authoritative edition of “A”: the monumental lifepoem by one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, Louis Zukofsky. River that must turn full after I stop dying Song, my song, raise grief to music Light as my loves’ thought, the few sick So sick of wrangling: thus weeping, Sounds of light, stay in her keeping And my son’s face – this much for honor ― from “ ‘A’-11” At long last, here is the whole of Louis Zukofsky’s epic masterpiece “A” back in print with misprints corrected and a new, fresh introduction by the noted scholar Barry Ahearn. No other poem in the English language is filled with as much daily love, light, intellect, and music. As William Carlos Williams once wrote of Zukofsky’s poetry, “I hear a new music of verse stretching out into the future.” Review “‘A’ ’s place is in the great line of American personal epic begun in Song of Myself and stretching through the Cantos, Paterson, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, and The Dream Songs. It should be read.” - The Nation “Zukofsky’s art, in this work, is without equal. No poet of our time can sound the resources of language, so actuate words to become all that they might be thought otherwise to engender.” - Robert Creeley, The New York Times “Magnificent: a great poem really rolling in all its power and splendor of language.” - James Laughlin “'A' belongs in the company of the major modernist epics such as Pound's Cantos or Williams' Patterson. It will repay as much attention as it is given.” - Bob Perelman, The Philadelphia Inquirer “The poem is “of a life,” but the life that it presents is closer to life-as-experienced than life as narrated or told. And that, in the final analysis, is precisely the essence of Zukofsky’s genius.” - Mary Wilson, Make Magazine About the Author Louis Zukofsky spent forty-six years writing his masterwork “A,” and died before he could see the completed version published. Poet, translator, fiction writer, essayist, anthologist, critic, teacher, WPA worker, and binding force of the Objectivist poets, Zukofsky was born in New York City and lived in or near the city his whole life.

Lisa leads us through the spiritual journey of her life with poignant reflections on family, love, fears, hopes and dreams. Audrey Copeland, Professor UAF Lisa Miller forges a lean and sinewy poetry that is at once reflective and raw, invoking both the head and the heart. Millers free-verse wends its way along peaks and valleys of the human journey, and the author is as steadfast before lifes inevitable pains and she is sanguine amid its myriad delights. This is a collection of sincere and insightful glimpses from a fellow sojourner. Paul Korchin, Ph.D. Professor of Religion, University of Alaska, Fairbanks

No one before or after Kurt Tucholsky has captured the horrors of the "Great War," as World War I was known, quite like he did. The famed Weimar writer, who would become one of Germany's best-known satirist and journalists, describes surviving in the trenches and fighting a losing battle, the arrogance of the officers and the desperation of the loved ones back home. His writing is similar to that of Heinrich Heine, his role model, in that it appears superficially simple but is replete with hidden meanings. His works are touching, stirring, and precisely to the point. He brings alive the war that still looms even into our own 21st century. This is the first bilingual anthology in German and in English of his works on World War I. The First World War was the "Great War". Everything that happened after this war, even into our own 21st century, is contingent on the years between 1914 and 1918. The Great War also shaped Kurt Tucholsky who emerged from the war.. His style is biting, satirical, and penetrating, full of Berlin gallows humor. This bilingual anthology contains English translation of his short stories as well as a rendition of his poetry about World War I, all representative of his style.

The modern world is a crucible of risks and pressures. Katia Kapovich's new poetry collection, Cossacks and Bandits, addresses a coherent range of cultural, aesthetic, psychological, philosophical, social and political issues relevant to the complexities of modern life. How does one survive war, terror, loss, injustice, trauma, displacement, marginalization and other hurtful experiences without embracing cynicism or indifference? What resources of strength must we rely on in a society that is ideologically and economically fluid and at times cynical and indifferent, where mass culture, institutional religion and national belonging have only weak and doubtful remedies to offer? The book focuses on the personal histories of men and women who are survivors of sociopolitical and economic distress. To Kapovich such individuals are the true modern hero and heroine. They show that at the limits of experience, survival and dignity depend on creative thinking, on a leap of imagination, as in the Russian children's game of Cossacks and bandits. Set in the US, Eastern Europe and the Middle East - regions that the poet knows intimately, having spent a considerable part of her life in each - this volume is a poetic survival guide to cultural and geographical displacement, alienation and marginality. With feeling and mastery, with sadness and humor, Kapovich fuses a diverse polyphony of voices and themes into original, full-blooded, lyric American verse of great general and literary interest.

Product Description Poems in this collection come from several volumes published in the German between 1969-78. They expose, with bitter humor, injustice: "The freedom to open one's mouth / exists even when / some people proclaim / 'They are being made to shut up'...You need simply make a list of all / that comes out of mouths...Firstly screams / ...if all goes well / ...the voluntary confession." (p. 45) Fried was deeply involved in post World War II German politics and in politics in general. Stuart Hood writes: "Fried's poetry is remarkable because it expresses a spectrum of feeling in which there is no dividing line between the political and the personal." Political injustice is felt deeply and personally. Fried was a radical unattached to any party or idealogy. Review "A poetical voice of infallible distinction, energy and wit." --Library Journal "Fried's poetry is remarkable because it expresses a spectrum of feeling in which there is no dividing line between the political and the personal." --Stuart Hood About the Author Erich Fried 1921-1988 Born in Vienna left for London in 1938, worked with the BBC. More than 20 of his works have been published 100 Gedichte ohne Vaterland won the 1978 International Publishers Prize Prix des Sept. Poems in this volume were written 1969-1978

This is the work of an important poet. Widely recognised for her insightful, even incendiary, prose theory and compelling fiction, Elana Dykewomon's brilliantly crafted, elegant poetry is showcased here. Nothing Will Be As Sweet As The Taste collects new and earlier verse. Steeped in the intense energy of lesbian activism, these poems contextualise a vital period in 20th century history. Intimate, ironic or explicitly sexual, this is riveting poetry. Elana's is truly an original voice, balancing vision with hilarity, intellect with warmth.

Denise Levertov's Poems 1960-1967 brings together all of the poetry first published in The Jacob's Ladder (1961), O Taste and See (1964), and The Sorrow Dance (1967). This new compilation, beginning where her Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 left off, shows both a refining of the poet's craft and a widening of her concerns.

If someone came up and started talking a poem at you how would you know it was a poem? So begins David Antin's Talking, a collection of writings that defy classification. Combining a passion for storytelling and improvisation with a unique sensitivity to the relationship between verbal and written language, Antin creates a work that is hilarious and intelligent, making use of techniques of poetry, fiction, theater, autobiography, and cultural criticism. The four pieces here center on political, social, and artistic concerns that were both timely and ahead of their time. In them we see Antin's real poetic achievement: the creation of new artistic forms.