Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Chrysalis in the Desert

Chrysalis in the Desert

Saloman, Wendy

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 184861036X
ISBN13: 9781848610361
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: Apr 15 2009
Pages: 100
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.24 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

The central poem in Wendy Saloman's new collection, and from which it takes its title, is the narrative of a woman's journey through various crises in Jewish history, from biblical times to modern Israel and Palestine. The protagonist, Rachel, is 'moving through time/as fire over water/as ash on ice'. 'Rivers and Revenants', the other main poem in the book, is again concerned with roots only this time the voyage is of a more personal nature: the author draws upon her own experiences of a visit to Lithuania in order to discover her grandfather's farmstead. In both these poems, and elsewhere in her work, there is conveyed the ever present drama between otherness and unity. Chrysalis in the Desert is Saloman's first book since Syllables and Leaves (Salzburg, 1997) and, although different in theme, it continues to fuse history and nature and to hold, as Mandelstam put it, 'the contradictions in one hand'. What informs the whole of her work is a belief that silence is the state from which all art must rise, and it is only from there that one may obtain a true hearing of the world and listen for, and learn from, the voices of the dead.

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