Description
Book SynopsisWith empathy and compassion, Hilda Raz writes poems that span her private and public lives. Her poems explore the complexities that come with being alive in the world today.
Trade Review“Early on in
Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been, a speaker worries, ‘What if I’m broken and can’t be mended, / or worse, the world is broken around me / and I the only whole thing in it?’ Here is the Jewish notion of
tikkun olam, that it’s our task to repair what is wounded. Indeed, in this impressive collection showcasing more than thirty years of work, Hilda Raz makes an argument for poetry as a way of healing our brokenness. These are poems that remake the world of ‘melt and fracture’—using language that growls from the page—so that it belongs to everyone, all the ‘odd and splendid’ parts of ourselves worthy of examination, of praise.”—Jehanne Dubrow, author of
Dots & Dashes and
The Arranged Marriage“I love the immersive experience this book offers. Readers track Raz’s imaginative language across the decades, as she mourns and meditates, catalogs and investigates. Resisting the cultural and technological policing of women’s bodies, the poet evokes illness, recovery, sorrow, and delight. These narrators—gritty, world-loving, tenacious—bind the personal and political in unforgettable family and diasporic narratives. Unprecedented when first published, Raz’s poems about mothering her transgender child have become foundational texts. ‘Some of what I couldn’t stand to lose I lost,’ a narrator states, echoing Elizabeth Bishop, one influence here. Friendship and the natural world console: ‘If the good life is coming / to us in our lifetime, / surely it is here / in this orchard in April at twilight.’ Like her jeweler son’s transformation of wire and gemstone into bracelet and earrings, Raz’s transformations—of body, circumstance, homeplace, passion—work a resilient, wondrous alchemy.”—Robin Becker, author of
The Black Bear Inside Me “To read Hilda Raz’s
Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been is to open a precious gift, to sit down to a feast celebrating a life in poetry. If you’ve read Raz’s earlier work, the poems will be old friends, made new by seeing them in this expansive context. If you have not, you have a journey ahead worth any price, let alone the price of a book. Raz’s poems deal with grief, longing, and loss in all their complicated forms but interwoven with transformations that take your breath away. Her poems are in turns lyrical and challenging, but always precise, each word exactly the right word. And at the end of
Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been, there are the new poems waiting to be discovered and savored, poems which, to quote a title in the book, serve as ‘Letters from a Lost Language,’ that haunting, that beautiful.”—Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of
America that island off the coast of FranceTable of ContentsEditor’s Note by Kwame Dawes
Introduction by John Kinsella
What Is Good (1988)
I
She Speaks
Yom Kippur
Father
Shabbos
Dishes
Accident
Piecing
Saying Goodbye to the Property
What Is Good
II
Family
Worry about Meaning
Helios at Bread Loaf, the Album
With Stanley Kunitz at the Car Wash
The Man
Women Raised in the Fifties
Shame, or the Computer Uses of Natural Language
Assignment
Three Ways of Looking at It
Trying to Buy off Death
Lacunae
III
What Happened This Summer
Divorce
Detail
1 September, 100 Degrees
Journal Entry: The Tropics
A Meeting with My Ex-Husband
Version
Pain
Small Shelter
High Ground
IV
Some Other Women Now
Plate xii
Widow
Lot’s Wives
Gossip
She
Oracle
Pregnant Woman
Visitant
Cradle
I Am Sick
Visions
V
Jan’s Orchard, Nebraska
Locus
Sex
Alone
Late March
Look
Piecing the Universe Together with Dresses
Friend in a Distant City
Advice
I Can’t. Yes, You Can.
C3
Prospectus
Life Outside the Self: The Uncertainty Principle
The Bone Dish (1989)
That’s Something
Sarah’s Wing
April Teaching, Outstate Nebraska
Diction
Native
Words
Birthday
November Night Driving
Town/ County
Bear
The Sandhills, Early Winter
Conversation
Photograph of a Child Sleeping
What Happens
My Daughter Home from College Tells Me about the Gods
Ambition
September: Getting Married Again
My Dream, Your Dream
Inside the Geese
Divine Honors (1997)
Prologue
Repair
Narrative without People
Let’s consider the consequences
Isaac Stern’s Performance
I
I Hear the Name of the Moon and Am Afraid
Weathering/ boundaries/ what is good
To Explain
Mu
Coming Down with Something
Fish-Belly-Mound
“Two Are Better Than One”*
Getting Well
For Barbara, Who Brings a Green Stone in the Shape of a Triangle
Day-Old Bargain
Breast/ fever
II
Sarah’s Response
Sarah among Animals
Sarah’s Head/ 16 March, Four Months after Surgery
Sarah Fledging
Sarah’s Waltz
Balance
Order
Axe-earrings, abalone shell
Birth
III
Opening/ Working/ Walking
Hey You
Grieving, she hits the red fox
Mapping/ Bleating
Trope
Sow Sister
Bernini’s Ribbon
Petting the Scar
Teaching, Hurt
Riddle
IV
Chigger Socks
Daylight Savings: Sandy Creek, Nebraska
Cobb’s Hill Pond
Fuss
Zen: the one I love most holds my tongue
Camarada
From Your Mouth to God’s Ear
“We don’t deserve what we get”
G: But it’s still not all right with you?
Mutation Blues
Insomnia Again
Service
V
Hot
Dying
Terror: A Riddle
Nuts
Lincoln, Nebraska
Letter of Transmittal
Now
Who Does She Think She Is
Earlier
Vowels
Epilogue
Gloxinia/ Flicker/ Oxalis
Recovery
My Award/ The Jews of Lukow
Ecstasies
Trans (2001)
I
Avoidance
What Do You Want?
Drought: Teaching, Benedict, Nebraska
Tough
Names My Mother Knew
Houses
Said to Sarah, Ten
Fast Car on Nebraska I-80: Visiting Teacher
Afternoon, with Cold
Sick
Back
Friday
“The world is not something to look at; it is something to be in.”
II
Secrets
Heart Transplant
Footnotes
Doing the Puzzle/ Angry Voices
Prelude
Part Coquette, Part Monster
Trans
Trans formation/ Feathers/ Train Travel
Stone
Before John and Maria’s Wedding
III
Historical Documents
Volunteers
Some Questions about the Storm
Lost Jewelry
Mother-in-Law
Women & Men
Some Questions for the Evening Class
Insomnia III
She
Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been
Not Now
Summer
Anna Maria Is Coming, or Maybe Thomas Barton, or Max!
IV
Hello
The Address on the Map
Wonder Woman’s Rules of the Road
Aaron at Work/ Rain
Sarah Returned to Me, Wearing the Poet’s Gloves
Company/ 3 AM
First, Thus
The Storehouse
Early Morning, Left-Handed
Visitation: Pink Foam Letter
The Funeral of X, Who Was Y’s Mother
All Odd and Splendid (2008)
I. History: Everyone today looked remarkable
Vocation
Diaspora
Childhood
Water Ceremonies
All Odd and Splendid
Wilt
Son
He Graduates from Clown School
He/ She: The Bike
Credo
Spring Snowstorm
Dante’s Words
Sunday Morning, without Couplet
Tyr
II. The Transfer of Power: So absolute and immutable
Once
Storm
The Transfer of Power
An Evening
Infant, in New York
Visit
Four/ Two
Eva Unwraps a Band-Aid
III. War: Button, feather, tassel or stripe
Complaint
Flight
The Public Baths
Pets
September 11
Fire Should Be Measured by What Didn’t Burn
Paper Strip
IV. Seeing the Changes
Arousal
Coma
A Friend
Her Dream
Objects When the Body Fails
Beloved, 24
Funeral, then Flu
Suite
The Changes
A Body of Water
Elegy for Two Poets
V. The Especial Shape
2 AM Migraine
Moving Pictures
Dark Haired, Dark Eyed, Fierce
Professional Travel
Alice
VI. All Odd and Splendid
Terza Rima
Now
Tenor Part
Splendid
Love This
Thank You Very Much
List & Story (2020)
I
Autobiography
The Spa of the Three Widows
Transportation
Home
Go
Late September
Photograph
Here we go alone, and like it better so
Flowers of Immortality
II
Women and Poetry
Women’s Lib
Collaboration
Women and the Global Imagination
The Burnt Journals
Dear Sky
April
One Toe, Crooked
List and Story
Six Objects in a Gold Foil Box
War
A Covey of Scaled Quail
Another Story
III
The Impossibility of Stasis
The Past and the Future
Watching Bulls/ Falling in Love with the Dead
A Conversation about Text
Emma
IV
Nick Spencer, Two Days Dead
The da Vinci Moon
A Meditation on Respect
Meditation
The Mandala of Now
A Symposium on Love
Pristine
The Sisters
Talking to each other
First Light
Seasons
Letters from a Lost Language
Published and Uncollected Poems (1975–2019)
Writing Big
Fiction
Long Night
2 AM, after Dental Surgery
Graffiti
Every Way
Spring Again, Rural Nebraska
Lost Glasses
Anna Bites Her Friend Emma at Preschool
Round/ Square
Dwell/ April
Fragments
Birthday, Red-Tailed Hawk
Blackberries
Up All Night
Abecedarian II
A Story from Mah-Jongg Club
The City of Suffering
Another Story
New Poems (2020)
Dear God,
Arms/ Belief
Beloveds
Clothes
Echo
Formal
Seasonal
Looking out the Window, Accordion Polka Accompaniment
Picked up in the Garden, with a Line from Mary Oliver
Eva Sings
Risk
After the Memoir, Revelations
“Nobody Teaches Life Anything”
Policy Discussion, Therapy
A Life
Sentences
The Truth
A Wedding
Credo 23
Failure
Fort Pond
Victory Garden, Grass Skirt
Acknowledgments
Notes
