Overview

"In this intimate collection of poems, Deborah Kahan Kolb invites the reader to join her ongoing journey of becoming, of reimagining a life in the years after leaving the insular Hasidic community of her childhood. The author's poems of birth and birthing, of the personal and political reinvention of the self, offer a glimpse of the ways one can -- indeed must -- transform and emerge constantly new, to allow trapped light to escape. At times reflecting on the deeply personal relationships of marriage and motherhood, at times invoking the collective memory of Jewish history, Escape of Light places the reader at the epicenter of one woman's evolving journey of self-discovery. This poetry collection is a winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO Award, and the poems ""After Auschwitz"" and ""Re(vision)"" have been adapted for the award-winning short film Write Me."

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9781646621507

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Reviews

It's often said that truth is the final destination of the human spirit. Such is the vision that attends Deborah Kahan Kolb's powerfully sentient book, Escape of Light. She is a truth-teller, granting us the grace of permission to be birthed into a world of both the hope and the wrath of humanity-- to air the soil of anguish, shame, and rage, while salvaging what is pardonable. Spawned from the opening poem Emerging, Art of, there is an arresting voice of acceptance, a leave-taking from the binding coils of memory's inheritance of tragedy. Whether of a son's burial, a Great Grandfather's sufferance at Auschwitz, or of Charlottesville's weeping bloody soil, a self-enlightened healing graces her poems to protect us from disappearing into the amnesia of history, the unthinkable allowing of things. She chooses, instead, to embrace the steady march of metamorphosis, through the personal and the political, to emerge from the impotence of silence to restore the music of memory through poetry and song. Her poems examine what is humane in us, the trapped light that escapes, to affirm Stephen Hawking's credo, things can get out of a black hole. Escape of Light is evocatively alive in its testament to truth as core to the survival of the human spirit. --James Ragan, Author of The Hunger Wall and Too Long a Solitude Deborah Kahan Kolb's Escape of Light is about the establishment of self, about becoming. Kolb explores what it means to pass from one existence into another, and she does this with startling and precise imagery. We are reminded of the responsibilities of personhood as we shepherd daughters forward into adulthood and what happens when we fail them in the most profound ways. Moreover, Kolb likes to remind us of the ways that history prefigures the present, whether that history is personal or political. Again, it's that movement toward becoming, which--as she demonstrates with her prescient vision--is a complicated and unfinishable process. --Sonia Greenfield, author of Letdown Deborah Kahan Kolb offers a poetry of the body, of birth and birthing, of a girl becoming a woman but also of an elderly Holocaust survivor finally beginning his life by removing the concentration camp tattoo from his forearm. Escape of Light twines together the intimately private and the searingly public in carefully crafted and formally inventive poems that are not easily forgotten. --John Biguenet, author of The Torturer's Apprentice and Oyster Deborah Kahan Kolb's Escape of Light proves that we are the light that is birthed into the darkness of history. Steeped in Jewish history, each poem is a burst, is a detailing of the burden of birth, whether that birth be: the removal of a compulsory tattoo, becoming a matriarch, entering the afterlife, entering a new age, or crystallizing into a writer. In this collection, Kolb is our butterfly laureate, our Hallelujah, our brave woman in the ring. I can't wait to see what she writes next! --Jennifer Jean, author of The Fool

Author Information

Deborah Kahan Kolb is the author of Windows and a Looking Glass and the recipient of numerous writing prizes, including the 2018 Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO award. Much of her work is informed by the unique challenges of growing up in the insular world of Hasidic Judaism. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications and has been selected as a finalist for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award and an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. Read more at www.deborahkahankolb.com.

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