Poetry collection by Michal Rubin10/15/2023"From the South Carolina patio I watch news from my other home, Israel, counting the dead after seven days of war that is flooding homes, streets...all ground my feet knew so well, and the ground of our neighbors, where my feet have not traveled.The poems in this collection have been written throughout the past couple of years, and are in no way an up-to-the-minute record of the events unfolding between Israel and Palestine.
Author(s): Michal Rubin
56 Pages
Poetry, Subjects & Themes
Description
About the Book
Poetry collection by Michal Rubin
Book Synopsis
Poetry collection by Michal Rubin
10/15/2023
"From the South Carolina patio I watch news from my other home, Israel, counting the dead after seven days of war that is flooding homes, streets...all ground my feet knew so well, and the ground of our neighbors, where my feet have not traveled.
The poems in this collection have been written throughout the past couple of years, and are in no way an up-to-the-minute record of the events unfolding between Israel and Palestine. They are but my reflection and the expression of my own battle between my attachment to Israel, the home of my childhood, and my heart ache over Israeli politics as it relates to the Palestinian people. I have long been torn between leaving Israel and loving it, all while facing the truth and deceptions in the telling of its modern history. The poems weave a story of finding refuge and home of one
peoples while losing refuge and homes for another peoples.
Today, as I write this forward, the map of my wrestling is plastered on every news outlet, across social media, and on the faces of my friends and family. I recollect my childhood fears of my imagined atrocities of war as I sat in a bomb shelter, a twelve-year-old with my mother and our neighbors. Then later in the day, I face my very adult fears of antisemitism intermingled with my shame and pain for my country's behavior in the occupied Palestinian territories. The fears are no longer painted in muted, careful colors, but in a garish bold cruelty. The visions of atrocities that were fears of a twelve-year-old, no longer are imagined fears but the reality of the savagery my people and our neighbors are drowning in. My
poems are a telling of my small corner of this story of two peoples who have lost their way and continue to wander in the desert of the
human shadows. May we find a way to see the humanity of each other."
Review Quotes
Michal Rubin's Home Visit is more than a book of poems-it is a demand, righteous and insistent, that we forge a better world. A daughter of Israel and a fierce critic of it, Rubin's poems linger on the details of Israeli occupation: demolished homes, brutalized old men, water-starved villages. Rubin refuses the easy platitudes, "the chanted words / of well- meaning protesters." Instead, she insists, "Words are steps on hot coals." Take it as a promise: these poems will burn away hypocrisy and willful ignorance. Take it as a warning: these poems will sear your heart.
-Toby Altman, author of Discipline Park
Michal Rubin's poems of "awoken brokenness" are full of domestic detail-the smell of caramelizing onions, the sleek paper of a childhood story. Such details conjure a world that has shaped the poet indelibly, her feet "marked with the imprint" of the Israel that she has traversed, that she struggles, still, to call home. In poems of grief and outrage, Rubin refigures home to include the Palestinians who also are "held/by the groove of dismayed land." And so we too must be haunted by the image of a child clutching a pillow beside a demolished house. Rubin's incisive, insistent vision takes up the ironies of history and makes them intimate. We cannot refuse to listen when she inscribes her anguish "in the deafness of here." These searing poems make clear that until we learn to embrace our neighbors, we are all in exile.
-Elizabeth Robinson
Dimensions (Overall): 8.27 Inches (H) x 5.83 Inches (W) x .13 Inches (D)
Weight: .19 Pounds
Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up
Number of Pages: 56
Genre: Poetry
Sub-Genre: Subjects & Themes
Publisher: Cathexis Northwest Press
Theme: Death, Grief, Loss
Format: Paperback
Author: Michal Rubin
Language: English
Street Date: January 1, 2024
TCIN: 1011505484
UPC: 9781952869860
Item Number (DPCI): 247-48-9005
Origin: Made in the USA or Imported
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Estimated ship dimensions: 0.13 inches length x 5.83 inches width x 8.27 inches height
Estimated ship weight: 0.19 pounds
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