*Not Akhmatova* Is Out On July 23rd

My first poetry collection, published by Ben Yehuda Press.

Hi all! My first ever poetry collection is out July 23—next Tuesday!— from Ben Yehuda Press. You can preorder now from the press, Amazon, and B&N (where it’s 25% off today.)

Here’s a little review/blurb by poet/novelist Jendi Reiter:

Playful and musical, yet weighty with paradox, Noah Berlatsky's Not Akhmatova is a collection of freewheeling translations and original poems that respond to the fraught question of Jewish loyalties in the diaspora. Berlatsky shows that one doesn't have to believe in God to argue with Him. In these pages, Russian-Jewish poet Anna Akhmatova is both present and absent, a figure who epitomizes her people's persecuted dead. The shape of that absence has sometimes seemed to bend Jewish identity around it like a black hole. Berlatsky recognizes that gravitational pull even as he resists it. This serious project is leavened by wry aphorisms about the ephemeral nature of poetry, and indeed life itself—a pessimistic, wisecracking sense of humor that situates Berlatsky firmly within the Judaism with which he wrestles.

And here’s one of my poem’s from the collection, a sort of translation of Akhmatova, originally published in the Cincinnati Review:

Lot’s Wife

The righteous man followed God’s messenger,
huge and terrible, like a black mountain.
His great back to Lot’s wife was sorrow and fear.
She longed to stop and see just once again

the white spires of her home, the place
in the square where she sang to her children.
The windows of the house where in joy and pain
she gave birth to her children.

And so she turned back, for one last sight.
Her eyes like those windows were empty.
Her body was a pillar of salt, bleached white.
Her feet were rooted in place, like a memory.

We aren’t supposed to mourn her.
She’s a fool, and so many others burned.
They say do not look towards her
who defied God, and turned.

So, hope some of you are inspired/intrigued enough to preorder! Thanks for supporting me here; your contributions help me keep scribbling in poetry and prose both!