Post by shayepoet on Oct 23, 2008 17:46:06 GMT 2
The Bag of Broken Glass
Yerra Sugarman
"Yerra Sugarman’s first book Forms of Gone marked the appearance of a mature poet with an invaluable world-view, that of a daughter of Shoah survivors settled in Canada interrogating and recreating a vanishing palimpsest of experience. The Bag of Broken Glass, with a mastery of form and of the multi-vocal sequence, enlarges on the poet’s project: investigates the permutations of the erotic in the quotidian and the ways the past permeates the present; examines the natural world in its intersections with memory; examines Scripture with a contemporary exile’s eye on history, psychology and language. This new book establishes Yerra Sugarman as an important poet on the North American literary landscape, as a 'world' poet whose concerns have no borders."
—Marilyn Hacker
Sample Poem:
Because I Am a Stranger
Because I am a stranger and bruise,
a mirror —
Because I take my shoes off to walk
barefoot by the mint and jasmine.
Practice silence.
Because I am fugitive, an orphan, narrow
oiled machine.
Pretend I can balance
the bomb and the basket
with the womb —
Because I open up to soot and rain.
Burn like prayer —
Am a raven
and recede along the unfinished
sentences of clouds.
Almond, grass, grain, ice, wing on a hedge —
I crisscross.
Drag history.
Am a throat for parable.
Vinegar for affliction.
Unsettled as a teardrop.
Supplicant who falters
washing your ribbons of blood,
your unruly rivers.
Because
I am a pipe,
then song.
Raves and reviews for The Bag of Broken Glass:
"Yerra Sugarman is an award-winning poet whose work has been featured in numerous journals and publications. Her work here is reminiscent of an Old Testament psalmist, giving voice to the dark peripheries and wounds of life with lyrical grace and quiet elegance. Through skillful poetic forms and simple words, she creates powerful moments in time. Whether inhabiting the ancient past, detailing a troubling presence, or looking to an unknown future, she speaks with a universal voice. ...
...Critics have described the poetry in this book as invaluable, extraordinary, eloquent, luminous and masterful. Such praise is understatement. The Bag of Broken Glass has my highest recommendation."
—Laurel Johnson, New Works Review
“Standing at prayer, mourning and grieving, preoccupied with suffering, somehow the poetry of Yerra Sugarman breaks through, functions something like a solar system--around a sun that is Beauty and constant, there moves a planet Clarity of Utterance, there are the planets History and Holocaust, and the twin planets Passion and Eye whose gravitational pulls keep it all in motion, then there is Music (a voice distantly related to a cello), and the planet Language (that like our Venus is the brightest of all), finally there is Decency, which is made of iron and has its own star. This extraordinary display in the literary heavens appears in every poem.”
—Stanley Moss
"The prize-winning selection, a “day” from Yerra Sugarman’s “Journal: Rai’ut Coma Ward, Tel Aviv-Yaffo, July 2003,” begins with the question, “What to call it…” and ends with a related, apposite question: “But what happens when language can no longer bear us?” The poem articulates grief and loss by indirection, accumulating sharply etched details of the quotidian to evoke absence and silence; to evoke, in other words, the unsayable. The darkness of the confrontation and its final cri de coeur stand in paradoxical balance with a poetic language almost overcharged in its sensuous appeal…. The free-verse lines are deployed with great skill, and the lyric-elegiac tone eloquently encounters the dust storm (sand storm?) of history.”
—Michael Palmer, Awarding Yerra Sugarman PSA’s 2007 Cecil Hemley Memorial Award
About the Author:
Yerra Sugarman received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first book, Forms of Gone, published by The Sheep Meadow Press in 2002. Her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, was published in January 2008, also by Sheep Meadow. She is the recipient of a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, its Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, and, most recently, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award and a 2008 Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers. Her poems, translations and articles have appeared in Prairie Schooner; The Nation; ACM; Cimarron Review; Literary Imagination; Nightsun; Lyric; Pleiades; White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood; Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and other publications. Her work has been translated into French and published in French journals. Born in Toronto, she lives in New York, where she has taught creative writing in undergraduate and MFA programs. She currently teaches writing at Rutgers University and Baruch College (CUNY). You can find links to samples of her work at her blog.
ISBN: 1-931357-58-7, 120 pages, $13.95
The Sheep Meadow Press * January, 2008
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