What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking

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Poetry. Jewish Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. "Rachel Tzvia Back transmutes the hard and sharp facts of the world into green and gold in these poems that bristle with desperate hope. She's always biblical to me, not just because the Galilean landscape she lives in is so like that of those old psalms, but also because she too was a mother who sent her son to war, though she sees in that son another's son—a boy killed on a beach in far Gaza, while playing. The poet here becomes mother to both, she rises up in need to save both, to spin these new and much needed psalms. Shone upon by a tradition of humanism and compassion, Back dares to ask the famous questions first articulated by Fanny Howe: 'Where did the days go? Where to now?' And the last one, the one that always haunts her, throughout all the poems in this painful and wise book: 'Are my children safe?' 'We will need a new language,' Back warns. Good then that she's giving it to us."—Kazim Ali

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