Tell It To the Rabbis and Other Poems 1977-2000

Poetry. Moving through a great range of moods and modes over twenty-four years of writing, yet unified by an unmistakable voice--lyrical, colloquial, ardent, irreverent--TELL IT TO THE RABBIS is a generous revelation of Stephen Kessler's heteroformalist poetics. From the erotic to the satiric, the surreal to the prosaic, the journalistic to the intimate, the sentimental to the cynical, the epigrammatic to the incantatory, the author's versatility, passion, wit and imagination are alive on every page. "A love poet of sensitive memory, he constructs his poems as bastions of feeling amid crumbling values and collapsing affirmations"--Jack Hirschman.

Stephen Kessler is the author of eight previous books and chapbooks of original poetry, fourteen books of literary translation, and a collection of essays. He was a founding editor and publisher of Alcatraz, an international journal, and The Sun, a Santa Cruz newsweekly, among other periodicals and independent publishing ventures. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Lambda Literary Award for his translation of WRITTEN IN WATER: THE COLLECTED PROSE POEMS of Luis Cernuda, and is a four-time winner of the California Library Association's PR Excellence Award for The Redwood Coast Review, the quarterly literary newspaper he founded and has edited since 1999.