Description
Poetry. Women's Studies. "Ruth Handel's MOMENTARY STAYS is a remarkable hybrid of lyric, documentary poetics, and inspiration for teachers. Drawing on seven years of poetry workshops with women in a psychiatric hospital, Handel assembles a rich and moving account of the growing recognition, from both teacher and participants, that 'We need these proxies, / more fluent than ourselves.' Poems that record the patients' impressions appear alongside masterpieces by Blake, Keats, and Dickinson, as well as references to poems by Maya Angelou, Stanley Kunitz, and others. Dynamic and polyphonic, the book presents layers of listening and response with careful fidelity to the difficulty and complexity of the tasks at hand: how to 'voice an old pain,' how to abide 'terrible knowledge,' how to access and reclaim 'the life spark of humor, / which can shine out anywhere, for anyone.' Handel acknowledges the tenuous line between illness and health, the constant flux of light and dark—Blake's 'lamb and beast'—behind what appears to be a stable self. 'Which cards of identity will prove I belong on the outside?' she asks wryly, finding herself one day without egress from the locked ward. Bearing witness to ongoing struggles for self-actualization and recovery, these shared encounters nonetheless offer sustaining hope in the transformative power of poetry: 'We walk in its air, / sensing a portal.'" —B.K. Fischer
Author Bio
Ruth D. Handel is a poet, writer and teacher. She is the author of MOMENTARY STAYS (Dos Madres Press, 2017), NO BORDER IS PERENNIAL (Dos Madres Press, 2015), TUGBOAT WARRIOR (Dos Madres Press, 2013), and Reading The White Spaces (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Common Ground Review, Westchester Review, en(compass), The Jewish Women's Literary Annual, Let The Poets Speak, Controlled Burn, Clockwise Cat, Contemporary Hiabun Online, Evening Street Review, and the award-winning A Slant of Light: Women Poets of the Hudson Valley (Codhill Press, 2013). Ruth teaches poetry courses and workshops in poetry writing, gives poetry performances, and manages the Poetry Caravan, a volunteer organization of 30 poets who bring poetry to the community. In her professional career, Ruth developed the field of family literacy; her academic publications include Building Family Literacy in an Urban Community (Teachers College Press, 1999). She is professor emerita, Montclair State University, where she taught literature and literacy and integrated poetry into the teacher education curriculum.
Author City: SCARSDALE, NY USA