Jake Marmer
By Jake Marmer
-
Culture As a Woman, Being Reborn
Coming To Life By Joy Ladin Sheep Meadow Press, 102 pages, $15.95 Medieval kabbalists wrote obsessively about language powers that brought the world into existence. Joy — previously known as Jay — Ladin is a contemporary poet whose words are also creating a world. In her case, though, the world in question is Joy’s own:…
-
The Schmooze Concrete Poetry or Shiviti? Four Works by Hank Lazer
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Jake Marmer introduces four concrete poems by Hank Lazer. If you’ve been to an old-school Sephardic synagogue or a Hasidic shtibl, you’re likely to have seen various specimen of Shiviti, plaques which traditionally adorn the corner of the…
-
The Schmooze Reimagining Eve: Two Poems by Eve Grubin
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Jake Marmer introduces two poems by Eve Grubin. “I am certain of nothing but the holiness,” writes Eve Grubin in one of the poems published in her 2005 debut collection “Morning Prayer.” Both uncertainty and holiness are key…
-
The Schmooze Among the Trees of Exile: Poetry by Ivan Klein
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Jake Marmer introduces three pieces by Ivan Klein. Reading Ivan Klein’s work I imagine a man, sitting alone in an empty room, and talking. Not to anyone specific; probably to himself. In the emptiness his words echo off…
-
Life The Poetry of Being an Expectant Father
Jake Marmer, who writes about poetry for the Forward, is an excited father-to-be. He shares what it’s like to be an expectant dad in this piece of performance poetry, titled “Kicks”: Marmer is working toward his Ph.D. in comparative literature at CUNY Graduate Center and developing the Jazz Talmud Project, which combines poetry and music…
-
The Schmooze Three Poems By Alicia Ostriker
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Jake Marmer introduces three poems by Alicia Ostriker. Alicia Ostriker, winner of the 2009 Jewish Book Award in poetry, has many voices. From one work to the next her tone may leap from angry and confrontational to lyrical…
-
Culture Love Poetry in the Time of Conflict
War & Love / Love & War By Aharon Shabtai Translated by Peter Cole New Directions Books, 175 pages, $15.95 “Keats called it negative capability. I call it a capacity for sustenance — to sustain and be sustained, which is to say, to continue. And to continue means to always make and say something different.”…
-
The Schmooze Jews, Poetry and the Avant-Garde
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week Jake Marmer writes about “Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture.” Last year’s excellent anthology “Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture,” a comprehensive collection of writings from leading Jewish poets and critics such as Charles Bernstein, Jerome Rothenberg, Marjorie…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Why neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the US
- 2
Opinion The group behind Project 2025 has a plan to protect Jews. It will do the opposite.
- 3
Opinion Just about every interpretation of Trump’s narrow election victory is wrong
- 4
News Texas schools want to add Queen Esther to the curriculum. Here’s why Jews (and many Christians) are opposed.
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Rep. Ritchie Torres, outspoken pro-Israel advocate, is dropping hints that he could run for NY governor
-
Fast Forward Ursula Haverbeck, infamous German Holocaust denier known as ‘Nazi grandma,’ dies at 96
-
Fast Forward A Jewish museum in Tulsa held a funeral for remains of Holocaust victims it kept for years
-
Sports Texas A&M’s Sam Salz cherishes his first taste of DI college football — and the opportunity to inspire fellow Orthodox Jews
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
