In the second decade of the twentieth century, poets from a country that had till then been regarded as a literary backwater reinvented poetry in English, pioneering poetic techniques and approaches to language that shaped and continue to shape poetry around the world. The names of these poets are famous - Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Williams, Frost - and their works long canonized, yet scholars continue to disagree about what common purpose or technique is at the root of their revolutionary "modernization" of poetry. "Soldering the Abyss" illuminates the roots of modern...

Description: These psalms grow out of a decades-long fascination with the biblical psalms, particularly the Davidic psalms, which portray the tempestuous, sometimes awful intimacy of the Divine-human relationship. In the lightning-shot Psalm-space where Divine meets human, time shatters, splits, leaps like a river, and so does the soul of the speaker, now hunting God, now hunted, now languishing in despair, now reclining in quiet triumph against the pillars of Heavens. These contemporary psalms attempt to create a corollary to that biblical psalm space, a space narrowed to a single room in...

National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Memoir

Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman--Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self.
With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to...