{"product_id":"the-art-of-blessing-the-day-isbn-9780375704314","title":"The Art of Blessing the Day","description":"\u003cb\u003eA prize-winning collection of old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, about which the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: \"An exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and daughter poems, fierce and emotional, with their intense ambivalence, pain and joy, themes of separation and reconnecting, are among the very strongest about that difficult relationship.\"\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLifshin continues, \"These striking, original, beautifully sensuous poems do just that. Ordinary moments--a sunset, a walk, a private religious ritual--are so alive in poems like 'Shabbat moment'  and 'Rosh Hodesh.' In the same way that she celebrates ordinary moments, small things become charged with memories and feelings: paper snowflakes, buttons, one bird, a bottle-cap flower made from a ginger ale top and crystal beads. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"She celebrates the body in rollicking, gusto-filled poems like 'Belly good' and 'The chuppah,' where 'our bodies open their portals wide.' So much that is richly sensuous: 'hands that caressed you,  . . . untied the knot of pleasure and loosened your flesh till it fluttered,' and lush praise for 'life in our spines, our throats,  our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I love the humor in poems like 'Eat fruit,' the nostalgia and joy in 'The rabbi's granddaughter and the Christmas tree,' the fresh, beautiful images of nature--'In winter . . .the sun hangs its wizened rosehip in the oaks.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I admire Piercy's sense of the past alive in the present, in personal and social history. The poems are memorials, like the yahrtzeit candle in a glass. 'We lose and we go on losing,' but the poems are never far from harsh joy, the joy that is 'the wine of life.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Growing up haunted by Holocaust ghosts is an echo throughout the book, and some of the strongest poems are about the Holocaust, poems that become the voices of those who had no voice: 'What you  carry in your blood is us,  the books we did not write, music we could not make, a world  gone from gristle to smoke, only  as real now as words can make it.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Marge Piercy's words make such a moving variety of experiences beautifully and forcefully real.\"\u003cb\u003eWinner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An exquisite book...Strong, passionate and poignant. Marge Piercy's words make a moving variety of experience beautifully and forcefully real.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Lyn Lifshin\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Keep her volume near your home altar; Marge Piercy will give wings to your heart's stirrings.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"If poetry, as Auden said, exists to praise, then surely it exists to bless. And Marge Piercy teaches us the art of blessing in her poems, with the firmness of her eye, the courage of her strength, the directness of her language, as gritty and sweet and real as the fruits she carries with her on all her journeys through family memory and tradition, prayer and the holy days of sacred year, gathering her wisdom and the wisdom of her difficult Jewish tribe, and bringing that wisdom home.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Rodger Kamenetz, author of \u003ci\u003eTerra Infirma\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Missing Jew : New and Selected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e,and \u003ci\u003eThe Jew in the Lotus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Whether I find myself guffawing over 'Eat fruit' or falling shattered by \"At the well' or being attuned to the Breath of Life by 'Nishmat,' it is my life--my whole life--that I am finding, renewed and enlivened by these poems. We can shmooze these poems, pray these poems, Torah-study these poems. What we breath out, Piercy has breathed in; what Piercy breaths out, we can breath in. We and she breath each other into life.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Rabbi Arthur Waskow\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Marge Piercy's superb spiritual powers are up to their elbows in the lived world, bringing a liberated and grounded wisdom to everything they touch. Behind this book one hears the great embracing toast of Jewish tradition: 'L'Chaim!' -- 'to life!' In its pages the work of the heart and the work of the spirit are visibly, passionately advanced.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Jane Hirschfield\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Accessible, transformative, thrilling. Marge Piercy teases out the spiritual lights hidden within the most ordinary events. Here is poetry so reverent and disturbing that it borders on liturgy.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Rabbi Lawrence Kushner\u003cb\u003eThe Art of Blessing the Day\u003c\/b\u003e is Marge Piercy's fifteenth volume of poetry. Others include \u003cb\u003eWhat Are Big Girls Made Of?\u003c\/b\u003e; \u003cb\u003eThe Moon Is Always Female\u003c\/b\u003e; her selected poems, \u003cb\u003eCircles on the Water\u003c\/b\u003e; \u003cb\u003eMy Mother's Body\u003c\/b\u003e; \u003cb\u003e Available Light\u003c\/b\u003e;  and, new from Leapfrog Press, \u003cb\u003eEarly Grrrl\u003c\/b\u003e, her out-of-print and previously uncollected early poems. In 1990 her poetry won the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She has also written fourteen novels, all still in print, including \u003cb\u003eWoman on the Edge of Time\u003c\/b\u003e; \u003cb\u003eVida\u003c\/b\u003e; \u003cb\u003eGone to Soldiers\u003c\/b\u003e; \u003cb\u003eHe, She and It\u003c\/b\u003e (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award); \u003cb\u003eThe Longings of Women\u003c\/b\u003e; \u003cb\u003eCity of Darkness, City of Light\u003c\/b\u003e; and, most recently, \u003cb\u003eStorm Tide\u003c\/b\u003e, with her husband, Ira Wood.  Her fiction and poetry have been translated into sixteen languages.\"Growing Up Haunted\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I enter through the hatch of \u003cbr\u003ememory those claustrophobic chambers, \u003cbr\u003emy adolescence in the booming fifties of \u003cbr\u003eGeneral Eisenhower, General Foods and \u003cbr\u003eGeneral Motors, I see our dreams:\u003cbr\u003eobsolescent mannequins in Dior frocks \u003cbr\u003earmored, prefabricated bodies; and I see \u003cbr\u003eour nightmares, powerful as a wine red \u003cbr\u003esky and wall of fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFear was the underside of every leaf\u003cbr\u003ewe turned, the knowledge that our\u003cbr\u003ecousins, our other selves, had been\u003cbr\u003estarved and butchered to ghosts.\u003cbr\u003eThe question every smoggy morning\u003cbr\u003epresented like a covered dish:\u003cbr\u003ewhy are you living and all those\u003cbr\u003emirror selves, sisters, gone\u003cbr\u003einto smoke like stolen cigarettes?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI remember my grandmother's cry\u003cbr\u003ewhen she learned the death of all she\u003cbr\u003eremembered, girls she bathed with,\u003cbr\u003eyoung men with whom she shyly\u003cbr\u003eflirted, wooden shul where\u003cbr\u003eher father rocked and prayed,\u003cbr\u003ered haired aunt plucking the \u003cbr\u003ebalalaika, world of sun and snow\u003cbr\u003eturned to shadows on a yellow page.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAssume no future you may not have\u003cbr\u003eto fight for, to die for, muttered\u003cbr\u003eghosts gathered on the foot\u003cbr\u003eof my bed each night. What you\u003cbr\u003ecarry in your blood is us,\u003cbr\u003ethe books we did not write,\u003cbr\u003emusic we could not make, a world\u003cbr\u003egone from gristle to smoke, only\u003cbr\u003eas real now as words can make it.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305153286373,"sku":"NP9780375704314","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375704314.jpg?v=1767738139","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-art-of-blessing-the-day-isbn-9780375704314","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}