Second Tongue: Poems - Softcover

Small, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1944467122 ISBN 13: 9781944467128

Publisher: Brighthorse Books, 2019

Synopsis

Judith Small's new collection of poetry, Second Tongue, is a sharply observed identification with the immigrant heart and soul. Based on her work as a translator, the book's themes are loss, displacement, and the need to bear witness. The collection won the 2017 Brighthorse Prize in Poetry.

About this title

About the Author

JUDITH SMALL is a poet, educator, and member of the Volunteer Interpreters' Panel of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, FIELD, Epiphany, Feminist Studies, and New Letters. She has published one previous book, From the Island (Black Oyster), a mixed-genre memoir. Her prior awards include the CCLM Fels Award and two Pushcart Prize nominations. A finalist for the 2015 FIELD Poetry Prize, the 2015 Georgia Poetry Prize, and the 2016 Idaho Prize for Poetry, Second Tongue was the 2017 winner of the Brighthorse Prize in Poetry. Small is currently coordinating the after-school Peer Interpreters Program at Oakland's Castlemont High School, where bilingual students from immigrant families learn the fundamentals of interpreting as they support newcomer students and their families.

Review

"Exquisitely written, shaped, heard poems of witness, invoking whole rich worlds of being and knowing. Translation of languages, yes, but most of all, Judith Small's astonishing ability to voice what it means to be a human being for so many making the immigrant's leap-brave passage from life to life. A crucial, profoundly moving collection."-Naomi Shihab Nye, poet, novelist, and songwriter

"It may well be the hardest thing in the world to match the rhythms of experience among lost, displaced, and suffering people to the rhythms of superbly managed poetry, but that is just what Judith Small has done. And she even makes it look easy, enhancing both sides of the equation. She writes with a ferocious empathy and she handles her poems with consistent skill and integrity. I like this book enormously."-David Young, poet, translator, and founding co-editor, FIELD

"This unusual series of portraits or case studies-beginning with one of the poet herself-combines the inexhaustible power of story with a moving and ongoing meditation on translation and language itself. A hybrid work of witness and lyric, Second Tongue is a careful, expressive, and timely work of art."-Jennifer Grotz, poet, translator, and director, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference

"Second Tongue is a constellation of global persecution and resilience, of misery and transcendence; it is a work of art that interrogates the role of the narrator, the interpreter, and the bystander of modern life. How do we interpret the suffering of others, as well as our own? These poems sing the pain of existence and the wrenching sorrows of displacement; they also sing with the possibility inherent in carving out a new life, the glimmering promise-if only a person can successfully plead her case-of finding refuge, and of starting over."-Lauren Markham, reporter and author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life

"These hauntingly beautiful poems cut to the soul of the human experience. Judith Small uses words like the consummate artist, portraying with her deft strokes entire lifetimes. The lives are those of asylum seekers-and her words communicate to us not only their deep sufferings and trauma, but their joy, courage, resilience and aspirations. Their experiences, although continents away, and their emotions resonate deeply with us as universal. In a time when the foreigner is made to seem so apart and different, an intruder in the home society, Judith Small's poems fully portray the humanity of each individual, and in so doing strengthen the bonds that hold us all together as humankind."-Karen Musalo, professor and director, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, U.C. Hastings College of the Law

Edition details

• Publisher: Brighthorse Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1944467122
• ISBN 13: 9781944467128
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 146