The Broken Heart is the Master Key is Baruch November's masterpiece. The poems in this new collection have been honed by years of skilled craft, love, and longing for connection - whether with a woman with chestnut hair or with the Divine. November here infuses the dreams of his younger poetic self with the clear, sometimes sharp realism of a man who has known loss yet still embraces the world with open arms. The result is a unique Hasidic dance, a lyrical niggun that lingers in our hearts long after the last page.
About the Author :
Baruch November's new book of poems, The Broken Heart is the Master Key, features "After Esav," a poem nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2019, November's previous book of poems, Bar Mitzvah Dreams, was released, and Stephen Dobyns called the book "one of the best he had recently read." An earlier collection of poems by Baruch, Dry Nectars of Plenty, won BigCityLit's chapbook contest. Thomas Lux proclaimed that the poems inside it were by "a poet of talent, urgency, and a large and aching heart." November's works have been featured in Lumina, Paterson Literary Review, Tiferet Journal, NewMyths.com, and the Forward. He serves as a host and organizer of the Jewish Poetry Reading Series. It has featured such poets as Linda Pastan, Grace Schulman, and Alicia Ostriker. For two decades, Baruch November has taught courses in Shakespeare, Multicultural American Literature, poetry, fiction, and writing at Touro University in Manhattan. He has lived in many cities across the United States but currently resides in Washington Heights, New York. Alicia Ostriker is author of The Holy and Broken Bliss and former poet laureate of New York State.
Review :
The plain spoken yet musically resonant poems of Baruch November's collection, The Broken Heart is the Master Key, occupy a kind of middle zone between what November calls, "the ways of sorrow, the directions of loss-" and "the beautiful logic of belief." While spiritual aspiration haunts nearly every line of every poem, the sacred promise of it grows more vivid, the more it's complicated, blocked, thwarted or deferred by the body and its profane yet inescapable desires. With a sort of Talmudic passion for clarity and sensitivity to paradox, and a joyous love of low and high brow culture, Baruch brings the whole heterogeneous self to bear on what it means to be an American-Jew at this particular moment of our history.
-Alan Shapiro, author of Reel to Reel, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Night of the Republic, finalist for both the National Book Award and the International Griffin Prize
"Why are you not married?/The rabbis of my early days/demand of me/in my raging dreams." And so begins Baruch November's searing and introspective new poetry collection that grapples with the weight of romantic misfortunes, family expectations, holy teachings, and a sense of oneness. Can a lonely heart remain righteous and whole, or is it doomed to be buried beneath a "night/of a billion/careless stars"? Whether in the classroom, a synagogue, or a party for Jewish singles, November's wise yet well-rooted poems refuse to pull punches or shy away from life's most difficult questions. I am grateful for this. For while The Broken Heart is the Master Key does not claim to have all the answers, it nevertheless unlocks a door that breaks through darkness and draws us nearer to light.
-Jared Harél, author of Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, Winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry
In Baruch November's poems, sudden illuminations rise like proverbs to be remembered. A grandmother "Bracha mastered the parting /of childhood darkness;" an American immigrant to Israel who lost his wife "knew the ways of sorrow, / the directions of loss-/ a perfect guide/ for the land." And in moments of redemption, we can read the figure of the poet himself who... teaches us that The Broken Heart is the Master Key.
- Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022
