Poetry. Memoir. "Norma Farber's journal of the year after the death of her life's companion is in prose and verse. This formal doubleness turns out to be perfect for writing that is attentive as it is candid, cool as it is heartfelt, elegant as it is passionate."—Robert Pinsky

"The music of Norma Farber's YEAR OF REVERSIBLE LOSS is visceral, Orpheus singing the music of grief. 'Let the meniscus moon hone its dagger against the sharpening dark.' Mixing brilliant essay with exquisite verse situated between haiku and pensee, Farber ignores no detail of the natural world that might ignite powerful insight. 'My need is small / as the dusk under a lilac bush.' Where Anne Morrow Lindberg and Joan Didion try for this lucidity, Farber succeeds again and again."—Terese Svoboda

Author City: BOSTON, MA USA

Poet, concert singer, actress, novelist, translator; wife, mother, grandmother, widow, Norma Holzman Farber (1909 -1984) was the author of more than thirty books. Her poems appeared in periodicals including The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Times; artists illustrating her books included Petra Mathers, Arnold Lobel, Trina Schart Hyman, and Tomie dePaola; composers including Daniel Pinkham set her words to music.

At eighteen, in 1927, Norma Holzman married Sidney Farber, pioneer in the chemotherapy of cancer, legendary for his care of the ill. He died in 1973.