Return from Elsewhere

Poetry. RETURN FROM ELSEWHERE is the co-winner of the competition for the 2014 Outriders Poetry Selection. The volume contains over fifty short poems ranging, in the words of critic Gabriel Levin, through seemingly irreconcilable polarities: faith and betrayal, confession, secrecy, risk and failure [as well as] desire--licit and illicit. The book concludes with Porous, a long poem-sequence. Linda Zisquit writes like a dream--a dream of love, or death, or God. Her lyricism is pure and spotless...Disciplined in form, elegant in utterance, fearless in self- scrutiny, these are works of profound--can I say noble? --beauty...RETURN FROM ELSEWHERE is Zisquit's most brilliant book yet.--Alicia Ostriker Ever since her first collection Ritual Bath, Linda Zisquit has wrested her tensile, lyric poems out of seemingly irreconcilable polarities: faith and betrayal, confession, secrecy, risk and failure. Now, in her fifth collection, desire--licit and illicit love--is evoked through the sifting of memory in the extended sequence, Porous, its ruptured, centrifugal narrative seeking release from loss and regret; and in her cantilevered ghazals, the medieval Persian form's yoking of the sacred and the profane is perfectly suited to the poet's self- interrogation and probing of Biblical lore.--Gabriel Levin. If we ever doubted Linda Stern Zisquit's unique significance among English- language poets, Porous finally unites her with the author of the Biblical Song of Songs. A love--the love--is lost, but found again in the porousness of memory, just as the lost love of the Bible--the Creator Himself--responds to the soul of the poet-lover. [In the book's short poems and ghazals] there are quietly dramatic queries between nature or city, reaching back for wholeness to her maiden name/life. Throughout RETURN FROM ELSEWHERE, Zisquit forces us to contemplate what a Biblical poet writing in a Jerusalem today would be up against. It's exhilarating, restorative, and irreplaceable.--David Rosenberg.

About the Author :
Linda Zisquit has published four collections of poetry, most recently Havoc: New & Selected Poems. Her translations from the Hebrew include These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam, and Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach, for which she received an NEA Translation Grant. Born in Buffalo, NY, Zisquit moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1978, where she lives with her husband and five children. She is Associate Professor at Bar Ilan University, and directs Artspace, an art gallery in Jerusalem representing contemporary artists.