Butterfly Words - by Daniel Rosen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The words collected here were written because they were a necessity at the time. For each occasion, they fulfilled a specific and sometimes different purpose: reflect on a relationship, engage in a new one, or mourn a lost one. Sometime the necessity was out of duty towards those who were left behind, or to share a happy or sad experience, or trying to master and anticipate those experiences. Relationships are at the core of these writings. The relationships could be at the individual level, familial, communal, at a national level or even broader. They could also involve multiple levels. Over many years, these writings were stored as we collect memories, as souvenirs collect dust. Until, one day, I started dusting off those real or imagined memories. They were gathered and they met in this collection. And then, they started talking to each other, communicating without any control, like a Golem escaping his creator.

Review Quotes

Daniel Rosen's writing is tuned not only to the words, but the mysterious entities that lurk behind them. Jewish imagination at its very best!"
-RUBY NAMDAR, author of The Ruined House. Winner of the Sapir Prize, Israel's highest literary award

"Butterfly Words is a collection of writings--stories, poetry, essays, letters--which transit many worlds: Paris, Jerusalem, New York, the secular and the religious, the professional and the personal. While parts of the "story"
are explicit, other parts are omitted, and in a sense, the reader is asked to become psychiatrist to this psychiatrist/writer, to engage with what's said, to speculate about the unsaid. Robert Frost once said, 'It's poetry that's lost in translation.' But when translation is a necessity of moving between worlds, we glimpse the work that Dr. Rosen's languages must do. Meaning and beauty are sometimes captured in his English, French, and Hebrew,
and sometimes hover between. From Shhh--'Just peek at him/And see how much pleasure he has /In his eyes/ Just sitting next to you.' "
-OWEN LEWIS, author of Sometimes Full of Daylight
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University
2016 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

"What is one to do with history?/with what has come before and is no more/yet lays on one like a heavy blanket, /deadweight. In this quiet book/he keeps trying to bury other men's ghosts/to no avail, I am afraid/as they linger to the last page. Veter is Latin for beast of burden/and indeed/one feels his labored breath/ as he carefully steps/from page to page/up and on in light and shadow/ carrying us with his pen/and soldier's heart."
-DAVID READ JOHNSON, co-author of Principles and Techniques of
Trauma-centered Psychotherapy
Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry at Yale University