“Okrent’s voice is intelligent and perceptive . . . This is a deeply felt book.”—Linda Pastan
Meditations on nature cohabit with explorations of family entanglements giving insight, empathy, and wit to our experiences.
Rebecca Okrent rescues significance from the ordinary accumulation of days and losses that mark the passage of time, recapturing the reverence felt in childhood when everything held meaning. The poems emerge from moments when nature and experience insist: “I have something to tell you.”
Rebecca Okrent graduated from Bennington College, worked in publishing in New York, and later as a landscape designer, graphic artist, food columnist, and editor of an online magazine. She and her husband, writer/editor Daniel Okrent, live in New York and Cape Cod.
In her vital, elegiac poems, Deborah Gorlin inventories her dead in urgent acts of recognition and commemoration. Family members both nuclear and extended appear in their native stories to reanimate local histories, intimate geographies, and lost times. In a different series of personae poems, Gorlin catalogues dolls and totems within their particular cultural habitats, which range from Africa to the Andes, and imagines their daemonic hopes, dreams and emotions. In a final act of inclusion, she takes stock of her own spiritual hesitations, yearnings, approximations, and explorations of such crazy topics as fingernails, Hebraic trees, and fat.
Deborah Gorlin, co-director of the writing program at Hampshire College, has published both poetry and nonfiction and has extensive editorial experience. Her book of poems, Bodily Course, won the 1996 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. She is also poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.