Book Description
These poems open with an invocation, a haunting by voice, and move through a series of dramatic dialogues to a resolution in serenity, a resolution that is hard won, hard fought, difficult and temporary. These are poems about dramatic conflict, between “warring parties” – husband and wife, father and child, teacher and student – parties with conflicting desires, or open wounds. They speak to the condition of middle life, of being in the narrow place stuck between the present and the future, between the demands of work and family, between the hope for joy and the desolation of loss. The pain of broken marriage, the tragedy of daily life, the family struggle for identity, the self-doubt of middle age are multiplied into passionate voices that rage, plead, joke, and shout – sometimes in external dialogues, sometimes in dangerously violent inner arguments. Throughout, the language is tough and the dynamic lyrics are as tightly wound as springs.


About the Author
Rodger Kamenetz was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1950. He graduated from Yale University; he also studied at The Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University. He was a recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature in 1992. His poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in a dozen major anthologies and in numerous periodicals. Kamenetz currently teaches English and creative writing at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. He has published three books of poems, Nympholepsy, The Missing Jew, and Stuck, and an autobiography, Terra Infirma. Since the publication of The Jew in the Lotus, he has become known for his work in Jewish-Buddhist dialogue. His most recent book of prose is Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today's Jewish Mystical Masters.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

These poems open with an invocation, a haunting by voice, and move through a series of dramatic dialogues to a resolution in serenity, a resolution that is hard won, hard fought, difficult and temporary. These are poems about dramatic conflict, between "warring parties" -- husband and wife, father and child, teacher and student -- parties with conflicting desires, or open wounds. They speak to the condition of middle life, of being in the narrow place, stuck between the present and the future, between the demands of work and family, between the hope for joy and the desolation of loss. The pain of broken marriage, the tragedy of daily life, the family struggle for identity, the self-doubt of middle age are multiplied into passionate voices that rage, plead, joke, and shout -- sometimes in external dialogues, sometimes in dangerously violent inner arguments. Throughout, the language is tough and the dynamic lyrics are as tightly wound as springs.

The opening section, "Warring Parties," introduces such characters as Emily and Anthony, a homicidal student and her inadequate teacher; Joshua and Josie, heroin addicts in Wellfleet; and Joe and Meg, a pair of born-again Christians dealing with abortion, adultery, and hopelessness in small-town Louisiana. The next section, "Fathers and Sons," dramatizes the emotional conflict in a middle-class family between an indifferent father and an angry son. And the emotional center of this book, "An Uncertain Hour," takes the reader through an almost unbearable tragedy and yet shows, in the end, glimpses of resolution, hope and strength.