Elinor Nauen is Manhattan’s unofficial poet laureate of cars and baseball. Her newest book, “So Late Into the Night,” is a rollicking road trip on the model of Byron’s “Don Juan,” with over 600 stanzas of ottava rima about Derek Jeter (her non-Platonic obsession), road trips, her husband, morning minyan and herself. Nauen chatted with…
“I’m not going to be on Oprah,” said Zackary Sholem Berger matter-of-factly about his new book, “Zog khotsh l’havdil / Not in the Same Breath.” He’s realistic about his completely negligible chances, not because Oprah’s show and book club have just come to an end, but because he knows his work of original Yiddish poetry…
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Zackary Sholem Berger reviews “70 Faces” by Rachel Barenblat. There are a few very good poems in Rachel Barenblat’s “70 Faces,” a collection of “Torah poems” published last year following the sequence of the weekly reading. For instance,…
Does the Coen Brothers’ “True Grit” draw on ancient Indo-European myth? Forward contributor Zackary Sholem Berger translates two poems, “My Pedigree” by Moyshe Nadir and “Herring Barrels” by Dvoyre Fogel, in the latest issue of Eleven Eleven. Israeli musician Avi Avital has become the first mandolinist to be nominated for a Grammy award in the…
The editors at ZEEK recently came out with a poetry manifesto. Since the journal devotes significant space to poetry, and there are precious few publications which consider Jewish poetry in a serious way, I looked forward to their treatment of the subject. I glanced at the last paragraph and saw that the authors wanted to…
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