Finders - Softcover

Parson-Nesbitt, Julie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 093112283X ISBN 13: 9780931122835

Publisher: West End Press, 1996

Synopsis

This is a Chicago book of poems with a historybehind it. The author navigates the street-wiseworld of the personal, comes to terms with loveand interracial marriage, and offers a complexpolitical response to her Jewish heritage. Herwriting breathes a spirit of independence reminiscent of Emma Lazarus, Emma Goldman, andAdrienne Rich.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

In her accessible, often powerful debut, Parson-Nesbitt, a Chicago native, mines that city's multicultural history and energy to inform her gritty, graceful poems about identity and contemporary urban life. Buoyed by a quiet sense of humor, and in an eloquent free-verse style, the collection carries the commanding colloquial rhythm of a spoken-word performance. The poems weave autobiography-elements like her Jewish background, her marriage to an African American man (to which roughly a third of the book's poems are devoted) and her work as an ESL teacher-with broader themes of race and nationality that, like the exploration of Auschwitz and contemporary racial hatred in "Memorial," are grounded in particulars: "To love most/ in yourself what others would gladly/ kill you for/ is to know exactly/ who you are." In the impressive six-section poem, "Twelfth Tribe," the poet addresses tragedy in Brooklyn's Crown Heights with faulty memories of her own orthodox Jewish grandfather ("I remember my grandfather/ in the parts of myself/ I invent for a past/ that has immigrants, prayers,/ and an American river"). Parson-Nesbitt's most memorable poems dissolve the boundaries between the personal, social and political.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: West End Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 093112283X
• ISBN 13: 9780931122835
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 60