New Messiahs [Paperback]

Henry Israeli (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

"All is in this book: our lives from hour to hour, the memories that define us, love, redemption...But in the end the question still remains: "Who will come to bury / he who comes to bury me?" Powerful, crystal clear, intimate and world-building, this book is testimony and proof that the miracle of our lives will continue. New Messiahs is the right title." --Tomaz Salamun, winner of the Slovenian National Book Award

"In Henry Israeli's debut book, we are still on the infamous train of the twentieth century, there's no getting off, and we're all responsible and helpless. Thankfully, however, these poems are noble memories of transformations, they allow that we are made of "little bones that contemplation holds together." How the spirit carries the wounded body around in here! You can feel the real wind rage, feel yourself tested." --Jane Miller, winner of a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship

Editorial Reviews

Review

"How the spirit carries the wounded body around in here! You can feel the wind rage, feel yourself tested." -- Jane Miller

From the Publisher

6 x 9 1/4 trim.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 78 pages
• Publisher: Four Way; 1st edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884800351
• ISBN-13: 978-1884800351
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,666,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Henry Israeli's books include New Messiahs (Four Way Books: 2002) and Praying to the Black Cat (Del Sol: 2010) and, in translation, Fresco: the Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku (New Directions: 2002), Child of Nature (New Directions: 2010), and Haywire: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2011). He has been awarded fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Canada Council on the Arts, and elsewhere. His poetry and translations have appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Grand Street, The Literary Review, Quarterly West, Tin House, Fence, Verse as well as several anthologies. Henry Israeli is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books (www.saturnaliabooks.com). He lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife and daughters, and teaches on the English faculty of Drexel University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Discovering Love in the Wreck of Life, November 30, 2003

By 

Todd F. Davis (Altoona, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: New Messiahs (Paperback)

Henry Israeli's debut collection, New Messiahs, moves with strength and bitter tenderness to collect what might otherwise be lost: a dying father, "the machinations of a spring unsprung," the dismantling of a carnival that must move on to another town. The beauty of Israeli's poetry--which has appeared in some of the finest literary reviews--is two-fold: first, with stark and vital images, he weaves narratives that envelop the reader in a world that seems half-dream and half-hard stone: to get lost in this world is both pleasure and pain. Second, Israeli's play with language, in such poems as "Graffiti" makes one not care if the words have any meaning tied to the world where our feet touch solid earth. "I live in the jungle at the edge of civilization," he writes. "Well, not quite. . . . I live at the jungle- / gym near the hedgerow of realization; / that is, I have a goat that shakes my martinis, or, conversely, I goad / my shook-up friend, Martin, with phrases / like, "I love the hubbub of a summer day, / the elixir of a widow in white stockings." To watch Israeli take us near the edge of despair only to yank us back with language that makes us laugh is not only a pleasure; it is a trip we should all take. Buy this book. You will not be disappointed by a new voice who will say much to us in the years to come.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Seering Read, September 19, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: New Messiahs (Paperback)

Israeli's vision in New Messiahs arises out of a history both collective and personal. His speaker grasps--urgently, blindly, lovingly--at fragmented images handed down to him as the child of Holocaust survivors. But not only is the past brought into brutal relief in these pages. The present, entrenched in memory and imagination, and laden with snapshots of a father gone mad, figures as the book's overriding and inescapable subject. Raw and surprising, the rhythms of Israeli's lines feel wrenched from our daily struggles to live with and (paradoxically?) honor the things that break us.