In attempts to reclaim a shadowed past, the glimpses into the dark might start with a dream, an article or a memory. In Ahuva S. Zaslavsky's first collection of writing, Between These Borders Wanders a Golem, questing story-creatures shape-shift beyond what we might easily categorize. This hybrid book of poems, flash, and short stories presents psychic investigations into memory, trauma, and repeating ideas that roam a body. The in-between landscape that emerges between tales and characters urges meaning-makers to question whether we ever really remember the past, simply create it anew each time we reach into our dark memories, or both. Claiming none of it, all of it and more, Zaslavsky names that it is "in this opening / everything can go wrong or be filled with joy."
About the Author :
ahuva s. zaslavsky lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She was born and raised in Tel Aviv and graduated from The University of the Negev, Israel with a BA in behavioral sciences. ahuva completed her MFA in Visual Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, earning the LR Visual Studies MFA Thesis Award. In her work, ahuva looks into the relationship of space and place to memory and trauma. Through writing, painting, printing, sculpting and other mediums, her investigations permeate the social and domestic, the cultural and psychological. Her work has been shown locally and nationally. ahuva has completed the Art/Lab fellowship in 2022 and was named to GLEAN Portland's 2022 artist residency. Between These Borders Wanders a Golem is her first book.
Review :
Between These Borders Wanders a Golem shows great variation in form, method, and visual composition. Language is often used to compose visually, e.g., handwritten diary entries, hybrid pieces combining prose and verse, using text style and font as design elements to add thematic depth-all of it orienting the reader to the anxiety of all of the speakers, those wandering Golems, all seeking out shape in their misshapen lives amid climate crisis, loneliness, and covid. In the opening poem the speaker asks "What quickens?" Time quickens, grief quickens, feeling quickens, seeking quickens. And so does language and the revelatory prowess the language expresses. Ahuva S. Zasiavsky has made an incredible first book.
Jay Ponteri, author of Someone Told Me
These stories, imaginings and startling images prove zaslavsky's power and command of language, as well as a deep understanding of human connectivity. This potent work is charged with a constant state of in-betweenness, of curiosity, of never-ending continuums, all weaving a sophisticated dialectic that nourished and profoundly moved me.
-John Sibley Williams, author of skin memory
