Deborah Ager - The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry Edited by Deborah Ager and M. E. Silverman Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2013 Deborah Ager, M. E. Silverman, and Contributors, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: ePub: 978-1-4411-3602-2 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN We wish to thank you (Todah) the reader But we also have many more people to thank. Our spouses deserve our gratitude: Karen Sneddon and Bill Beverly. They have provided advice and encouragement at every step. Many thanks to David Lehman.

He gave generously of his time and expertise to guide us in the right direction. We hope we used his map wisely. Thank you to all of the poets who agreed to be part of this collection and who realized just how important this collection would be to our worldwide community. Thank you to Haaris Naaqvi, our editor, who brought our proposal in front of the board for consideration. Thank you to Arielle Greenberg and Amelia Glaser. And thank you to the board and to others we may not know.

We also thank the many presses who gave us access to the poems by their writers. Contents M. E. Silverman and Deborah Ager We joined forces in 2010 in order to develop an anthology of contemporary Jewish American poetry. Did the world need such a poetry anthology? We thought so, yet we started researching to be certain. While we found a few fine examples of anthologies related to Jewish literature, the books we found did not do the following: publish writers born after 1945, focus solely on poetry, or include a wide range of American writers from all corners of the United States.

Within these pages, we invite you to consider, explore, and reflect upon what shapes the heart of Jewish American poems that both celebrate Jewish traditions and honor the human spirit. In this book, we wanted to share distinctly Jewish American voices, which include second-generation Jews, converts, those on the path to conversion, secular Jews, a rabbi, those whove made Aliyah, and others. We included poems that both do and do not focus on Jewish themes, and we did that to convey the breadth and depth of Jewish personhood. With this book, we do not attempt to answer what it means to be Jewish in a time when so many follow a secular life. We seek to answer how the long history of Judaism expresses itself in the daily lives of the artists represented within these pages, and the poems do that on their own. Charles Bernstein, in The Klupzy Girl, wrote: Poetry is like a swoon, with this difference: / It brings you to your senses.

We hope you, the reader, will have enough poetic sense to see beyond the categories and labels to the beauty of each word, each image, and of the ideas within these poems. We hope you take our invitation to you to read each poem, to connect to these Jewish American poets, these contemporary poets with multiple identities, in the hopes you gain a better understanding of the contemporary Jewish voice, in all its vast diversities and complexities, that makes each poem (whether consciously or not so apparent) part American, part Jewish, part distinct to the individual, but always beautifully human. Shalom, M. E. Silverman and Deborah Ager Born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1976, he is the author of three collections of poetry: Thievery, winner of the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize; Northerners, winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose, and The Suburban Ecstasies. The Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing.

In 2008 he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize by Poetry, and his poems have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Best New Poets 2008, Poetry, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Boston Review, Colorado Review, and New York Quarterly. A regular contributor to Poets & Writers magazine and The Huffington Post, his essays on poetry, politics, and higher education have been cited online by The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, The Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. http://www.sethabramson.net Hy-Vee The eyes of cashiers are hard to see out of, because earnest lies are the hardest to get out of, and how many teams have I worn the uniform of, and why when we beat the others was it beating off I was dreaming of and what secret was I ever the holder of, so that when they spoke of me softly behind a door it was really me they were speaking of, and not the afterimage of what Id always hoped to be an example of, a kind of cousin of those young men my mother and some books had told me of, who could stand against whatever grief their gods could dream of, because something else had made the stuff they were made of, and there would always be a quiet life back home they were still worthy of, if ever they decided they had had enough of the hard young men theyd always worn the colors of. Poem For Battered Man On the morning the sun is loved by a woman on the right side of the bed, a platoon of red birds detaches from a willow across the river because they arent in love with it and it doesnt love them back. Poem For Battered Man On the morning the sun is loved by a woman on the right side of the bed, a platoon of red birds detaches from a willow across the river because they arent in love with it and it doesnt love them back.

For the flying flight is easy. I have to make rent for her and for myself. Soon there will be a breakup way up the flagpole, the flag will flutter down to cover its country. Not yet. Now there is a man or woman dying for a stranger on every screen, in every country. Its what we keep watching for, why I stay like this, why being just one day in this particular sunlight is worth the cost Im speaking of.

She is founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine. Many poems first appearing in the magazine have been honored in the Best American Poetry and Best New Poets anthologies and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Ager is co-editor of Old Flame: The First Ten Years of 32 Poems Magazine and author of Midnight Voices. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Los Angeles Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, From the Fishouse, and No Tell Motel. http://www.deborahager.com Fires on Highway 192 after Nerudas Disasters In Florida, it was raining ash because the fire demanded it. I had to point my car landward and hope the smoke would part, but it was a grey sea absorbing my body.

Cabbage palms were annihilated. Even the Indian River steamed. Black stalks stank. The condominiums spit smoke into twilight. Still, a cattle egret landed, preening, in a pasture filled with embers the cattle dead or removed. And I was hungry; there was nothing to eat.