Written in a lyrical voice, featuring both poetry and prose, two of the three books featured were published by the feminist press, Inanna in Canada. The poems chronicle transitional moments throughout a life. The first half of the book examines childhood memory, encapsulated in time through imagery, metaphor and turn of language, while the second half shifts the attention of the reader to the world of an adult, inclusive of teaching sites where I have been a reciprocal learner. The stories reconstruct memory again, those memories of my parents and of other child survivors of the Holocaust. Reconstructed primarily from oral testimonies, I fleshed out narratives across a range of historical experience, bringing to the foreground the creativity and resilience of children and adolescents who endured the unfathomable.
For the purchase of the two books, Inanna has a North American distributor.
Please visit Brunswick Books at orders@brunswickbooks.ca
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New Book of Poems entitled, "In the Absence of Sons" by Carol Lipszyc
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Back Cover & Front Cover
Can be purchased from Amazon (Canada)
The Heart is Improvisational
An Anthology in Poetic Form
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Poetry | Anthology ***************************************
ISBN-13: 978-1-771831864 ***************************************
ISBN-10: 1-771831863 ***************************************
$20.00 | trade paperback 6" x 9" | 130pp ***************************************
September 2017
Physical organ or seat of emotion? Exploring the heartbeat. Poets attribute an array of roles and capacities to the involuntary muscle and catalyst of our storied lives. The heart becomes a repository of erotic and familial love and a sanctuary for memory. In this collection, poets explore the flux of the heart’s responses and instigations: the heart’s tender overtures, its joyous pulse, its mating call for the other, its changeable temperament, its final tick in freeze-frame. Among the poets featured are: Kenneth Sherman, Lorna Crozier, Marilyn Bowering, Roo Borson, Patrick Lane, Charles Bukowski, Rita Dove, Eugénio de Andrade, John Barton, Robyn Sarah, and Mary di Michele
The book under review, The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories by Carol Lipszyc, a collection of stories about the Holocaust, is a fine piece of literature and, like most good literature, has its own inherent value. It not only fulfills the double function mentioned above of keeping alive the stories of survivors and reminding us of the brutality in Nazi-controlled Europe, but its memorable characters, gripping events, and simple but often beautiful language have a major impact on the reader.
Carol Lipszyc's stories are both moving and historically accurate. Her documentary style provides a sense of what life was like not only during the catastrophe, but in the months before and after. Readers should not expect stereotypical Shoah-tales. Complexities abound. I was particularly struck by the final tale,
"A Jewish Interrogation," in which a young survivor who has passed herself off as a Pole, is interrogated after the war by fellow Jews and made to prove her Jewishness. This is indicative of the uncanny way in which several of Lipszyc's stories explore Jewish identity.
Lipszyc can take a story gained through a retelling or an interview, then pace it and reframe it so that prose becomes poetry in her writing, sometimes leaving the reader breathless.
This is a valuable addition to child survivor testimonies and autobiographies.
Like the hum of the dashboard heater in her father's red Pontiac, singing her home from Hebrew School, Lipszyc's poems sing us home, to the heart of our shared humanity.
A hymn of praise to memory, to witness, and to those mysterious elements of the past, both individual and collective, that live on inside us. Alternatively solemn and playful, mournful and joyous, Singing Me Home speaks clearly and eloquently to the deepest wells of our own ever-strange, ever-wondrous lives.