A poet for fifty years, I'm proud to say that nobody's ever said, "I didn't understand your poem." The rhythms, images, and words in these books are in plain English. They have feeling and authenticity in common. They make connections. After a reading once, a woman said, "I feel as if I know your whole family." I feel the same about the authors of these books. I'm also interested in my quirky kind of American Jewishness at a time when it's in the news but complicated and misunderstood. Some of the books I chose reflect that.
I love this book because it goes straight for the gut.
These poems tell the truth no matter what. I never have to wonder what they mean. I love how authentic the poet is and how she gives everyday life a mythic quality, whether she's talking about her eggs and childbirth, or her awful parents, or going fishing with her kids.
This 45th anniversary hardback collector's edition of the bestselling debut collection of poetry by Sharon Olds includes a new interior design and an introduction by Diane Seuss. Satan Says received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980.
I love this book because it's about being a Jewish American woman in the same everyday way that I am.
There are so few books about that experience, not being religious, but about a culture and a spirit and little things that are woven into the fabric of life: Yiddish words and certain foods and ethics and values that we don't even think about.
When I read these poems, they lift me up and make me feel at home at the same time. You don't have to be Jewish to love them! And that's a Jewish joke.
A prize-winning collection of old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, about which the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: "An exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and daughter poems, fierce and emotional, with their intense ambivalence, pain and joy, themes of separation and reconnecting, are among the very strongest about that difficult relationship."
Lifshin continues, "These striking, original, beautifully sensuous poems do just that. Ordinary moments--a sunset, a walk, a private religious ritual--are so alive in poems like 'Shabbat moment' and 'Rosh Hodesh.' In the same way that she celebrates ordinary moments,…
I love this book because it was the first book of poetry I ever read that made me realize I could get it, that poems could be about me, women, feelings, relationships, my experience. It blew my mind.
I was an English major, and when the professors talked about modern poetry by men, I always felt baffled. These were poems I could understand and relate to. I read them shouting with joy, even though they were not happy poems.
It was okay to write and read poems about all kinds of feelings, and they didn't have to be in mysterious language. The language of these poems is wonderful, but it's also clear.
From Wikipedia: Sexton's eighth collection of poetry is entitled The Awful Rowing Toward God. The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter." This gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing. The Awful Rowing Toward God and The Death Notebooks are among her final works and both centre on the theme of dying.
I loved this book because it proved that you can write poems about the simplest, most everyday experiences and make them fresh, funny, fascinating, and new.
The whole book consists of poems based on the poet's experience working in a grocery store in the Midwest. I've never looked at groceries the same again.
And who knows? Inside every ordinary-looking clerk, maybe there's a poet.
I loved this anthology of poems for its authenticity and depth of feeling.
It was written by and for widows—of all genders and ages, in all kinds of committed relationships. The anthology demonstrates that there are an infinite number of ways to grieve and survive.
I have given this book as a gift to a number of friends dealing with the loss of a spouse or partner (not necessarily right away!), and they have told me they got a lot of comfort from it.
I think the quality of the poems and how different from every other every voice and experience described is give the book as a whole enormous power. It says, "This is something we all go through, we can each find our own way to grieve, and we are not alone."
The Widows' Handbook is the first anthology of poems by contemporary widows, many of whom have written their way out of solitude and despair, distilling their strongest feelings into poetry or memoir. This stirring collection celebrates the strategies widows learn and the resources they muster to deal with people, living space, possessions, social life, and especially themselves, once shock has turned to the realization that nothing will ever be the same. As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says in her foreword, losing one's partner is "a loss like no other.",
The Widows' Handbook is a collection of poetry from…
An 80-year-old New York Jewish woman poet looks back over a lifetime of experience and forward to her hopes and fears for the future of her granddaughters.
The daughter of immigrants, she has a long memory, a complex family history, and a rich fund of stories about her travels to faraway places whose beauty or very existence is vanishing today. In forthright language, she says what she thinks about our complicated times, our fragile planet, and the joy of being a grandmother.
