"The horrifying actuality that is the Holocaust sits like an immovable altar to evil in the middle of the twentieth century. Fifty years later, Endre Farkas, child of Holocaust survivors, revisits its terrors through the stories of his parents and through his own journeys. His parents, who both survived concentration camps only to confront renewed xenophobia a dozen years later during the Hungarian revolution, were forced to escape with their young son to Canada. The book is a personal journey of sortsa journey to recover, if not innocence, perhaps lost hope."Canadian Literature

Surviving Words is Endre Farkas seventh book of poetry and his most powerful and accomplished to date. It is a collection of singular yet interwoven poems that, with haunting simplicity, evokes the horrors we inflict upon each other. The book begins with his parents experiences in Auschwitz and Mauthausen, moves on to deal with his childhood memories of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and concludes with poems about the ongoing acts of genocide. The poems in Surviving Words are striking for their imagery and tone. With subtle irony, they remind us that "nothing is...