A collection of sixteen poems, by twelve contemporary authors, celebrating Jewish holidays such as Yom Kippur and Purim.

A collection of poems by a variety of authors celebrating the joys of canines, from puppies to old hounds, from Chihuahuas to mongrels.

In 1290, the Jews were banished from England. In 1655-1656, Jews once more became a part of British society, returning to the London of Oliver Cromwell, Pepys and Henry Purcell. To commemorate the 350th anniversary of this return, Michelene Wandor has written a sensuous dramatic narrative poem evoking seventeenth-century London, and telling the story of the two men who made this return possible: Oliver Cromwell and Menasseh ben Israel. "Music of the Prophets" is the third in a sequence of long poems celebrating the presence of the Jews in England. The text seduces and challenges with a delicacy and flow, combining open-form experiment with a musical delight in counterpoint, irony and wit.

"CLOSE YOUR EYES, VISIONS is the material results of two experiments conducted by the poet Michael Ruby in the realm of poetic transcription, working with vision and what one sees when we close our eyes, coupled with both past and future life experience. It arose from an experience Ruby had twenty years ago, or as he writes, "I chose to remember I lay on the carpet with my eyes closed and saw a blue square, three green squares and a red circle." He goes on to describe the ramifications of that event: "This brief vision could be a Suprematist painting by Malevich from Moscow in the 1910s. It's like paintings by some of my favorite artists: Kupka, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Reinhardt, Newman, Rothko. It's part of a world of ever-changing colors and shapes, an abstract movie playing continuously in our brains just below the surface of consciousness, almost never perceived. Surely, these visions are a source of abstract visual art, just as dreams are a source of fiction and inner voices are a source of poetic lines.""--

Emoticoncert follows intensities and absences across different bodies and scales. Broken up into musical "movements," each section serves as its own composition. As a whole, the book works as a concert of intensities associated with loss, nationalism, and the slippery boundary between human and animal. Moving across both real and dreamed terrains, Emoticoncert is a dislocated kind of traveling linked by a sense of musicality and a desire to record the intensities that arise in the author's entanglements with things both present and gone.

"From a marketplace in Bangkok to the fields of New Hampshire, from recollections of her own childhood to celebrations of an infant grandson, Kumin stakes her far-flung claims with authority in her tenth book of poetry."--Publishers Weekly

A native of Crimea, the Soviet Jewish poet Ilya Selvinskii (1899-1968), in 1942-43, bore witness to Nazi atrocities in and near the city of Kerch (in eastern Crimea) and in the south of Russia. This included the massacre at the "Bagerovo ditch", an anti-tank ditch west of the city, where the Nazis murdered ca. 7,000 Jews of Kerch in November 1941. What he saw impressed Selvinskii for the rest of his life. He was the first Soviet poet to publish extensively on the Holocaust, most notably his two poems "I Saw It" (1942) and "Kerch" (1945). In general, he somewhat downplayed the fact that the victims were Jews, as did Ehrenburg and other contemporary poets who wrote on the Nazi mass murders. Selvinskii's shock of viewing the Bagerovo ditch was also reflected in his postwar poems, in particular in "Kandava", the first version of which was published in 1946. Selvinskii influenced many other poets who wrote on the Nazi genocide, among them Iosif Utkin and Lev Ozerov. After the war Selvinskii was accused of "cosmopolitanism" and holding an "anti-party line"; he was partially blacklisted. Pp. 263-277 contain the Russian originals and English translations of "I Saw It" and "Kerch".

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Chicago poet Coval, an HBO Def Poet, grapples with questions of identity and compassion. He writes of latchkeys marooned in front the television at home and menaced by violence at school. Assessing his own Jewish heritage in Pieces of Shalom, he wants to turn my mind on the divine/without historical frustration. Vehemently condemning hypocrisy, Coval echoes Allen Ginsberg in his spiritual revolt, cosmic vision, and longing for multicultural transcendence. In boldly beautiful and outspoken hip-hop manifestos, he forges links among all Diaspora people, citing Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce, picturing Jack Robinson breaking the color line on the first night of Passover in 1947, and recognizing that davening worshippers in a synagogue are experiencing the same energy and ecstasy he experiences when enthralled by hip-hop. Potent metaphors, muscular turns of phrase, a keen political conscience, and a Studs Terkelesque openness to humankind's countless stories fuel Coval's percussive calls for compassion and connection. Accompanied by a CD and graced with cover art by the incomparable Tony Fitzpatrick, this is one potent and positive debut. --Donna Seaman, Copyright 2006 Booklist.

"A chapbook-size collection of poems written in the voices of high school students talking (and arguing) about immigration."--Author's website, viewed November 21, 2019: http://www.juditharcana.com/home

"Spare and understated gems."-- Small Press