Skip to main content
Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 (Wesleyan Poetry)

Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 (Wesleyan Poetry)

Current price: $22.95
Publication Date: January 9th, 2024
Publisher:
Wesleyan University Press
ISBN:
9780819501080
Pages:
296
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

Description

Collected poems of pivotal Jewish lesbian activist

Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry (2023)
Finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, Berru Award for Poetry, in memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash (2022)

A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. In her introduction to Klepfisz's A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, Adrienne Rich wrote: " Klepfisz's] sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless." Her Birth and Later Years was a Finalist for the Jewish Book Award and winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.

About the Author

IRENA KLEPFISZ (Brooklyn, NY) taught Jewish Women's Studies at Barnard College for 22 years. She is the author of four books of poetry including Periods of Stress, Keeper of Accounts, Different Enclosures, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, and a collection of essays Dreams of an Insomniac. She was co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology. An advocate of the Yiddish language and active in its renaissance in the United States, she has published poetry and essays have appeared in Jewish Currents, Tablet Magazine, In Geveb, Sinister Wisdom, The Manhattan Review, Conditions, The Georgia Review and Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures. Her Birth and Later Years was a Finalist for the Jewish Book Award and winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.