Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/poetry__fiction/page/9/)
Lily La Tigresse is unsparing in its critique, but it’s also seminal in terms of launching its indictment of Israel—a society that, in Kimhi’s view, is no more generous or compassionate than the barbarous terrain of Europe, not to mention the U.S.S.R.
Dear friend, asleep / upright in a seat / when I boarded the train / goat-stepping over / your legs outstretched / why didn’t I wake you / but instead watched / you sleep. A poem by Joshua Weiner.
After a funeral, they were covered with black cloth, / some draped with shawls like a scalloped valance. / … anything to shroud the odd-shaped mirrors, / though sometimes a corner was exposed like a woman / whose ankle peeks forbidden from under a long skirt. A poem by Carol V. Davis.
Arguably the two most immediate—and in my judgment, truest—books from the Great War, in spite of Hemingway’s assertion that there were none, were written by authors who not only never set foot on the battlefield; neither of them was a male.
the repeated words / sometimes made me think twice before / whimpering about a bruise on my knee, / or foolishly I would say the line just when she did…
A teacher is not one person. A teacher is the many voices he speaks and the quicksilver changes among them: the things he says to administrators and the things he says to parents; the things he says to ninth graders and the very different things he says to juniors; the farce and praise and kowtowing and congratulation, all those necessary notes across the register of human speech. We are whatever we are saying.
You enter the country next door from under the stone / Church of the Redeemer / subway exit. No Pork Chinese Restaurant / and Mr. Chicken, flank the avenue / both strictly halal.
“On a night with a new moon, owls/ called, back and forth, over the house.” A poem by Arthur Sze.
“Black coffee at noon with fellow sufferers. / The bleak cups squeak in our hands. So do the chairs…” A poem by Kenneth Fields.
So she bites it, her hand, bites it because she’s read somewhere about the transporting power of pain.
Not counting what I can’t remember, / the closest I ever came to her was when I put my hand / inside the urn…
With a smooth blade, he slit the throats of steers, / drained the blood into a bucket, salted the meat / to make it fully kosher. A poem by Carol V. Davis.
Where Karen Bender’s A Town of Empty Rooms truly succeeds is not in the petty arguments that move the plot along, but in how we, as readers, can observe how invested these characters are in those arguments. What emerges, then, is a novel about the unsaid, the unspeakable, and the ways we talk past the dividing lines between us.
But in class all she could see was Jacob, his lithe movements, the panicky heat of his body when she swam beside him and let their legs kick against each other in an ecstasy of splash.