The Launch of Celia Dropkin

We told you to keep your eyelids way up, and now! This Wednesday, July 16, if you find yourself in New York in particular, please ambulate to the Museum at Eldrige Street at 6:30 for a book launch that will feature translators Faith Jones and Samuel Solomon talking about and reading the Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin. "[The] keen translation captures the lyrical and emotional quality of Dropkin’s poems, which were originally written in the 1920s and 1930s."

The Acrobat, Dropkin's book of poems recently translated from the Yiddish by Solomon, Jones, and Jennifer Kronovet, and published by Tebot Bach, is now available at SPD. Among the praise from Alice Notley:

These remarkably vivid poems could be titled something like "Sensation--And How To think It." They are carefully made, but the poet allows herself a certain carelessness to say the unsayable. She is interested in violence and tenderness together, as our nervous systems seem to be. There are lovely Reznikoffian glimpses of Manhattan; there are the pleasures of the short poem -- the poem passing but lingering. The poems are of their time in the best possible way: you want to be there then, too. Early in the 20th century, in New York, having learned Yiddish or some other language new to you, watching a new age be born as if that were natural.

They're of our time too, now! Glad to know her.