About this item
Highlights
- The story starts at a Jewish funeral.
- Author(s): Shawn C Harris
- 86 Pages
- Poetry, American
- Series Name: Jewish Poetry Project
Description
About the Book
"The story of Tirzah Persephone Horowitz's, the brown-skinned, Jewish descendant of "the plantation and the shtetl," as she travels to Israel's holy city of Tzfat and discovers monsters"--Book Synopsis
The story starts at a Jewish funeral.
fist after fist fills with cool damp earth
It travels to Israel:
at ben-gurion airport
here she comes hauling her baggage
rendered clumsy by her burden
beneath that smooth brown skin
that halo of thick coarse hair
the plantation and the shtetl
live in blood and memory
her passport names her
tirzah persephone horowitz
after an aunt on her dad's side
who died so young in the camps
and her mother's favorite greek myth
but to call her tirzah is too much
like uncovering her nakedness
like speaking aloud the holy name
and the holy city of Tzfat...
i am a city of song
plucked strings of a lyre
loud brassy klezmer
throbbing techno beats
shoes clop-clopping on cobblestone
tires screeching on the asphalt river
winding round my peak
It features monsters...
terry loves monsters
loved them since her first pimples and pubes
sneaking dracula under the covers
wondering what it would be like
to feel a vampire's fangs on her neck
to taste human blood in her mouth
to transform into wolf or bat or mist
but dracula always dies
staked and beheaded by good christian men
because magic and mystery must not survive
And it ends...
No. That would be telling.
Review Quotes
"The Red Door is a finely observed, uniquely voiced collection that maps the dangerous terrain between brokenness and rebirth, which is dripping with blood, lit by prayer, and redolent with mystery."
-Gwydion Suilebhan, author of Cracked and Abstract Nude
"The Red Door, like its poet author Shawn C. Harris, transcends genres and identities. It is an exploration in crossing worlds. It brings together poetry and story telling, imagery and life events, spirit and body, the real and the fantastic, Jewish past and Jewish present, to spin one tale."
-Einat Wilf, author of My Israel, Our Generation and Telling Our Story
"The Red Door is the slit of light between two darknesses, not merely sampling Biblical verses and liturgical choruses (though it does that, too: "we are but dust and ashes v'imru amen") but adding new installments to the stories of antiquity. A sinister narrative is posed behind a lush canopy of poems, meshing the Jerusalem of Temple times with the Jerusalem of today with the uncertain prophecies that bounce around the backs of our heads as each of us wonders, am I the only one who hears this? No, Harris's poems whisper back. No, you are not."
-Matthue Roth, author of Never Mind the Goldbergs and My First Kafka
