Thorny

Walt Whitman Award winner Judith Baumel’s latest collection of poems, Thorny, is a fearless and poignant book connecting political displacement with personal and generational loss. Through rumination and subtle intrigue, Baumel invites readers to travel with her from the mystical pathways of Italy to war-torn Europe to the gutters and sidewalk cracks of the Bronx. Baumel’s thoughtful meditations rise above and snarl in the rock and sinew of the world, then pull the reader into a robust embrace. Casually erudite and recklessly passionate, Thorny brings past and present into close conversation, illuminating both.  

The first section is a set of strolls (“passeggiate”) with characters from classical pastoral poems reborn as contemporary Sicilians and Bronxites. They confront love and war, justice and anger. The middle section, “The American Cousins A-Z,” is an experimental fugue of Jewish women’s voices, post-Holocaust, lamenting, remembering and forgetting. Its proem sets a counterpoint mood by describing a photo of the Jews of Lubny, Ukraine, about to be massacred by Sonderkommando at the Zasylskiy Ravine two weeks after Babyn Yar. Sholem Aleichem was Lubny’s Crown Rabbi before he married, took a pseudonym and started writing his famous stories.  “Bound,” the last section, is an intensely personal consideration of family and loss.