These are emotionally powerful poems that speak to the condition of midlife, of being in the narrow place, stuck between the present and the future, between the demands of work and family, between the hope for joy and the desolation of loss. The pain of broken marriage, the tragedy of daily life, the struggle for identity, and the self-doubt of middle age are multiplied into passionate voices that rage, plead, joke, and shout. The language, tough yet dynamic, wraps itself around the images, which are at times deeply disturbing, at times strangely humorous but always honest, open, and real.
Rodger Kamenetz lives in New Orleans where he works as a dream therapist. His journeys have taken him to Dharamsala, India where he witnessed an historic dialogue between rabbis and the Dalai Lama that he recounted in The Jew in the Lotus, and to rural Vermont where he met the dream teacher Marc Bregman of North of Eden, as told in his History of Last Night's Dream. His latest book, Burnt Books, is a dual biography of Franz Kafka and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and also recounts his journey to the grave of the rebbe in Uman in Ukraine along with tens of thousands of Jewish pilgrims.
For more information about Rodger Kamenetz, visit his website at http://kamenetz.com, or meet him on Facebook, or follow him on twitter at
www.twitter.com/Jewinthelotus
