The Book of Anna is composed of narrative poems and prose diary entries written in the voice of Anna Ach Asher, a fictional Czech-German Jewish concentration camp survivor writing in mid-1950s Prague. The poems utilize the language and imagery of sacred Jewish texts—the Biblical story of Tamar, snatches of Talmudic disputation, the sensuous imagery of the Song of Songs, mystical texts related to the creation of golems, psalms traditionally recited to celebrate Sabbath—to tell the story of Asher’s concentration camp experiences.
Endorsements:
“. . . imagination rules, wedding poetic forms to unflinching meditations on human suffering, terror, love, and unbearable loss. Despite the ubiquity of evil and death in his poems, there is, in Yeats’s words, ‘a gaiety transfiguring all that dread.’”—Herbert Leibowitz
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JOY LADIN is on leave from Stern College of Yeshiva University, where she holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English. Joy’s first book of poetry, Alternatives to History, was published by Sheep Meadow in 2003. Joy’s poems and essays have appeared in many periodicals. She is currently finishing a new book of poetry and a study of American modernist poetics while writing a memoir called Inside Out: Confessions of a Woman Caught in the Act of Becoming.
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