A Winding Line gathers poems from the last decade by three of Israel’s most original and engaging poets. Biblical texts, political realities, landscapes, writing, and diverse personal experiences figure throughout the book, while each poet brings her unique voice to the pages. The book is translated by Tsipi Keller, and the poems are presented bilingually on facing pages.
Maya Bejerano’s complex poems often speak to human connection. Sharron Hass brings an interest in mythology, fairy tales, and the underworld to her poems of change and metamorphosis. Anat Zecharia, the youngest of the three, addresses more overtly political and sometimes erotic themes. Together, the anthology points to what scholar Adriana X. Jacobs calls in her introduction, “the vitality, persistence, and urgency of poetry in the here and now.”
Bios:
One of Israel's leading poets, Maya Bejerano has published fifteen poetry collections, a children's book, two collections of short stories, and a novel, and her work has been translated into numerous languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese. She has been called “a ‘poet-explorer’ who, through her poems, delineates the borders of consciousness, body, and time.”
The author of five poetry collections, poet and essayist Sharron Hass has received several major awards, and has participated in poetry festivals in Israel and abroad. It has been said that her “language is invigorating and condensed, integrating the corporeal and the metaphysical, as she covers the distance between life, creativity, and death.”
Poet, dance critic, and editor, Anat Zecharia has published three books of poetry and is a member of the Artists’ Greenhouse for Social Activism project in the Musrara School of Photography & Media in Jerusalem. She represented Israel in The Poetry Parnassus, a festival of readings and performances, and part of the 2012 London Olympics.
Novelist and translator and the author of seventeen books, Tsipi Keller is the recipient of several literary awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction grants, and an Armand G. Erpf Translation Award from Columbia University. Individual translations have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Europe.
A Winding Line: Three Hebrew Poets
A Winding Line: Three Hebrew Poets — Maya Bejerano, Sharron Hass, Anat Zecharia
Translated from Hebrew by Tsipi Keller
Poetry
182 pages | Bilingual (Hebrew & English)
$20
ISBN 978-1-938890-86-4
"[Tsipi] Keller skillfully captures the distinct voices and insights of these three poets, while also highlighting the introspective nature, boldness in addressing provocative themes, and ability to craft incisive observations present in each of the three poets’ works."
— Shanti Silver, Action Books Micro-Reviews
A Winding Line gives us an amazing decade of poetry by three powerful Israeli women poets, each breaking through the over-familiar surfaces of normal life and normal politics, to give us depth—of myth and imagination, of pagan sensuality, of penetrating satire, wrestling with the present moment as with a lover or a foe. No answers here, no ideology, only penetrating insights in which “the struggle never ends” (Bejerano), “God flattens us / to stillness and then lets go” (Hass), and “the world’s apple demands that we bite into it” (Zecharia).
— Alicia Ostriker