Works-in-Progress

The Unfurling Wings: A Memoir

Alef and Bet: A Love Story in Times Like These: A novel-in-verse about a love relationship between a literature scholar and a poet, both middle-aged, academics, and both of whom identify as women. The manuscript explores what it means to live passionately in the current cultural moment.

To Be Contained So Briefly in the Body: This manuscript of poems contains elegiac work and poetry that addresses diverse global traumas, the fluidity of gender, the writing of renowned poets, and the vicissitudes of love and friendship, sometimes through the lens of rhetorical theory, particularly that of Plato and St. Augustine. The theme of “postmemory” is a frequent subtext in this collection: the identification that children of survivors of extreme collective and cultural trauma have with their parents’ experiences.

Yizkor: Elegies for Vanished Towns: A poetry collection that will expand upon the genre of the elegy as a work of mourning for an individual’s death, allowing for the persistence in our daily lives of lamenting the fate of entire communities of anonymous people.  The elegies in this collection will be in dialogue with and explore Yizkor books—hybrid Holocaust memorial texts that document the history of Eastern and Central European Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazis during World War II.

In the Hot Wind: Translations from the Yiddish of Celia Dropkin’s collection of poems, In Heysn Vint—In the Hot Wind.  Dropkin was an innovator of the erotic modernist love poem in Yiddish and wrote during the first half of the twentieth-century.  Her work addresses sex, love, death, and motherhood with groundbreaking candor.

The Book of Questions, Volume I: Translations from the French of the twentieth-century French-Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès’s text, Livre des questions I.  His work is a hybrid verse-novel—a mosaic of aphorisms, dialogues, narratives, fragments, and imaginary rabbinic commentaries—whose disjunctive and elliptical storyline brings to light the account of Yukel and his lover Sarah, French Jews, Holocaust survivors, and survivors of the concentration camps.  While the book engages with the notion of the Holocaust’s ineffable violence and horror, it, likewise, addresses the violence inflicted on us all by language’s inscrutable nature.

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