A Mayse-Bikhl is now available from Papaveria Press.
Thank you to Erzebet for her care and binding of this beautiful book, to Rose for her editing and Jeannelle for her amazing introduction. The cover photograph was taken by my grandfather, Alfred Glixman, in Westminster Synagogue in 1969. The sifrei Torah he saw there, rescued from destroyed communities in Eastern Europe, now being restored in order to be returned to their rebuilt synagogues or re-gifted to new ones, were not yet a museum. Today they're the Czech Memorial Scrolls. It has always been one of my favorites of his pictures and I am glad to give it, too, a home. (Thanks to Dorian Color for being willing and able to scan a poster-sized Cibachrome print.) The name in the dedication is my grandmother's.
I will have copies on me when I read this Wednesday at the Edwin H. Land Library at Norwich Free Academy as part of their Night of Jewish Poets and Poetry in honor of Emma Lazarus. The reading is free and open to the public and the other poet is Richard Michelson. If you don't live in the Northeast, you may look here. I hope to organize other readings in the Boston area soon.
This is my first collection in six years. Some of the poems date back nearly ten. The most recent was written this spring, the oldest when my life might as well have belonged to someone else. (I remember the third floor of the Brandeis library, a pile of hardbound scores and the newly discovered poems of Phyllis Gotlieb and sort of overstuffed Morris chairs in industrial teal-green. It is September and the light coming in through the stairs is only just starting to pale. I don't yet own a leather jacket; I have just stopped wearing sneakers. I carried index cards everywhere in my pockets, even when I had my backpack, and the same model of mechanical pencil I'd used since eighth grade. I used to draw cartoons on the backs of them; then I kept notes for poems. I passed one off as a parking ticket once.) Reading back through them was like stepping through ghosts, especially considering the timeline of this project—late September through now, the season that is densest with memories for me.
You walk on, with dybbuks in you, even when they are yourself. You don't believe in the Messiah, but you keep looking to the east. The life of the world to come feels a lot like this one. You talk to yourself, because someone should always be telling the story. The only person who can take that word off your forehead is you.
Thank you to Erzebet for her care and binding of this beautiful book, to Rose for her editing and Jeannelle for her amazing introduction. The cover photograph was taken by my grandfather, Alfred Glixman, in Westminster Synagogue in 1969. The sifrei Torah he saw there, rescued from destroyed communities in Eastern Europe, now being restored in order to be returned to their rebuilt synagogues or re-gifted to new ones, were not yet a museum. Today they're the Czech Memorial Scrolls. It has always been one of my favorites of his pictures and I am glad to give it, too, a home. (Thanks to Dorian Color for being willing and able to scan a poster-sized Cibachrome print.) The name in the dedication is my grandmother's.
I will have copies on me when I read this Wednesday at the Edwin H. Land Library at Norwich Free Academy as part of their Night of Jewish Poets and Poetry in honor of Emma Lazarus. The reading is free and open to the public and the other poet is Richard Michelson. If you don't live in the Northeast, you may look here. I hope to organize other readings in the Boston area soon.
This is my first collection in six years. Some of the poems date back nearly ten. The most recent was written this spring, the oldest when my life might as well have belonged to someone else. (I remember the third floor of the Brandeis library, a pile of hardbound scores and the newly discovered poems of Phyllis Gotlieb and sort of overstuffed Morris chairs in industrial teal-green. It is September and the light coming in through the stairs is only just starting to pale. I don't yet own a leather jacket; I have just stopped wearing sneakers. I carried index cards everywhere in my pockets, even when I had my backpack, and the same model of mechanical pencil I'd used since eighth grade. I used to draw cartoons on the backs of them; then I kept notes for poems. I passed one off as a parking ticket once.) Reading back through them was like stepping through ghosts, especially considering the timeline of this project—late September through now, the season that is densest with memories for me.
You walk on, with dybbuks in you, even when they are yourself. You don't believe in the Messiah, but you keep looking to the east. The life of the world to come feels a lot like this one. You talk to yourself, because someone should always be telling the story. The only person who can take that word off your forehead is you.
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