Shulman’s collection guides readers through the ideological formation of American Jewish children, teenagers, and young adults, showing how they are carefully acculturated to conflate Judaism with Zionism—a fusion designed to keep dollars and political will flowing toward Israel, no matter how ferociously it attacks or constrains the people who also occupied the land now called Israel before 1948.
(reviews)
In Kiefer’s Maine, the trucks, soon to contain slaughtered chickens, have “waiting mouths,” “the air [has] feathers”—as if all that’s left of that life is scattered to the wind. Kiefer braids losses throughout the book; it can feel as if loss, like farm grit, “filters into every soft thing.”
(reviews)
“We live in a world of translation—and mistranslation, as between the coexisting people and languages there’s a lot of noise—meaning, all the elements that don’t let the message from the source be appropriately received,” Dimitris Lyacos tells interviewer Toti O’Brien.
jail bars no stars no cars
just jail bars hard time
in the pen no friends cuz
they will do you in hard
time in the pen no friend
that what you get out of
doing hard time hard time
-Carvis Johnson, anthologized by Louis Bourgeois
(abolition/carceral state)
“As it relates to Unit 29 specifically, writing offered a rare opportunity to convey a message that would actually be read. For some, it was an opportunity to attempt something they never tried before. The act of writing and the program itself allowed for a structure by which they could order their lives in a chaos that barely ever sleeps,” Louis Bourgeois tells interviewer Mike Puican.
“Book bans have existed as long as there have been books, throughout history, just like war. It’s a form of war; part of war; part of politics and power grabs; part of trying to keep the population ignorant and deny people books. It’s also part of antisemitism and racism and every other oppressive movement you can think of,” Donna Seaman tells interviewer Carol Haggas.
suns as yellow as ours
gleaming suns
from lives like matches
atrocious explosions
scattering ashes
like bright corollas
(translations/ poetry)
And upon learning the true purpose of the miners, we Chiricahua forced abandonment of the Santa Rita del Cobre copper mine for decades. Ultimately, it was we Chiricahua whom the US Army, acting as agent for mining interests, did their best to kill in the nineteenth century. “But we’re still here,” Vic said and let that stew.
(No Place is Foreign)
I didn’t know we lived a few counties
south from where Frederick Douglass stood
half-naked, one shirt for a whole winter.
His hands smaller than my brother’s
who took all the jokes on the school bus
(poetry)
how many egrets lost footing in the candles of your chest,
syllables broken by rust?
(poetry/ No Place is Foreign)
