Everything Thaws
Everything Thaws

Author: R. B. Lemberg

Publisher: Ben Yehuda Press

Published: 2023-02-21

Total Pages: 93

ISBN-13: 1963475070

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R.B. Lemberg's poems are a manifesto of memories, unearthing worlds that are gone and poignantly present: their childhood in the Soviet Union, suspended between Ukraine and the permafrost of Siberia, among the traumatized, silent, persecuted members of their Jewish family; Lemberg's coming of age in Israel, being the other wherever they go, both internally and externally, in multiple identities, languages, genders; and the arrival in "the lost land" of their America, where they have put down "tentative roots." Every line in this stunning, lyrical memoir is chiseled with the poignant precision of ice into a coruscating cascade that engulfs us with the author's sensations of solitude, anger, grief; sometimes hurling like an avalanche, sometimes tenderly unfolding like constellations in a circumpolar sky - leaving open the possibility that with the disturbing truths covered for decades, the thawing permafrost from Lemberg's past might also lay bare layers of love.

Thaw
Thaw

Author: Chelsea Dingman

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 0820351318

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Thaw delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kin ship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. The poems follow the speaker, as both mother and daughter, as she travels through harsh and beautiful landscapes in Canada, Sweden, and the United States. Moving through these places, she examines how her surroundings affect her inner landscape; the natural world becomes both a place of refuge and a threat. As these themes unfold, the histories and cold truths of her family and country intertwine and impinge on her, even as she tries to outrun them. Unflinching and raw, Chelsea Dingman's poems meander between childhood and adulthood, the experiences of being a mother and a child paralleling one another. Her investigation becomes one of body, self, woman, mother, daughter, sister, and citizen, and of what those roles mean in the contexts of family and country.