My Little Book Of Exiles (Paperback)

Paperback. The poems of My Little Book of Exiles sift through layers of diaspora and return, wrestling with the twin experiences of exile and separation. The diasporas of the collection take place in history, family, and the privacy of a mind as it navigates its daily work. In a set of Labor Poems, Alter captures moments of working in the snow of Wisconsin, under floodlights on the Kenai bay of Alaska, or in themachine-roar of construction sites in the Bay Area, where he has worked for two decades as an electrician. Another set of poems confront the vision of the Jewish people's homecoming to their ancestral land. A philosopher of the "religion of labor"; and an assassinated Prime Minister are some of the figures which weave in with intimate histories of heartbreak and hope.Coming from a home where the Hebrew Bible was a book of bedtime stories, Alters work is in conversation with texts as varied as the Hebrew Psalms, the poetry of John Keats and Ezra Pound and the songs of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley.The collection concludes with poems exploring the homeland of family made through marriage and fatherhood, the strains and moments of grace that come with them. What can withstand the pressures of distance, the forces from outside and inside that want to pull us apart? The books strands weave a tapestry of hope even as the poems seek to discover finally what lasts. The poems in My Little Book of Exiles are engaged in stitching a frayed ancestry - Ashkenazi, survived by way of America - into the fabric of a twenty- first century life. These are poems of personal as well as cultural diaspora. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.