Overview

Borges tells us that our greatest artists disappear into their auras, the most public and least knowable of humans. We all feel at home with Kafka, the virtuoso of paradox, the patron saint of noir. Marc Kaminsky has taken on a visionary task: to restore the contingency of the living to a dead icon, to invoke a deeply complex mind, terrified of its own contradictions and caught in the peculiar character of a culture and a moment of time: [h]ow could he be proof/against the myth of redemption/when his sense of sin/was more real to him/than his own right hand?"" Deploying all the resources of a great poet, a wildly imaginative orchestra of tones and authorial stances, and an intimate knowledge of Jewish sources and academic tropes, Kaminsky takes us on a riveting journey toward the human. His book is both a poem and an anti-myth, a critique of the objectification inherent in authorial bias. Kaminsky won't force feed you ""the definitive Kafka"" he will suggest a thousand paths toward a Kafka who is free to remain a stranger, vulnerable, sundered, living. Kafka's Ax is a lifework, a crowning achievement of one of our important writers and thinkers. -D. NURSKE, author of A Night in Brooklyn Author's Note Many of the poems and prose pieces in this book are collaged texts, combining fragments of Kafka with imaginative and documentary writing. My key documentary sources include Kafka's Diaries, Max Brod's Franz Kafka: A Biography, Ernst Pawel's Franz Kafka: The Nightmare of Reason, and Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight. This work is a midrash-a speculative narrative and commentary-written from the perspectives of Kafka, some of the people in his life (Max Brod, Yitzkhok Leyvi, Dora Diamont, Kafka's father Hermann) and a variety of fictional characters (participants at a fictional Kafka conference, as well as a Yiddish folksinger/independent scholar, a Yiddish actor, and a refugee-informant). Sources of the collaged texts are cited in the Source Notes.

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9781962847292

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Reviews

In this tour de force, Kaminsky wields his own ax against the iconic ""Kafka,"" the classic modernist we think we know. Smashing that idol in the book's multiple collaged texts, poetry and prose, Kaminsky restores the shattered, impossibly cohering fragments of Kafka's own being. -PHILIP FRIED, author of Interrogating Water and other poems and editor of The Manhattan Review For Kafka, writing was an ax to break the frozen sea within. And so it is with Kaminsky's work, dipping and diving into twists and turns of Kafka's being, particularly his inner life - our inner life. Through poetry, prose, reflection, speculation and documentation, we are led to awe and appreciation for psycho-spiritual reality. We meet faces that seek us and a wind-swept visage challenges us to evolve further, if we can, if we dare. Kafka's Ax eggs us on to the far side of our lives, nothing closer or more intimate, whirls of opacity and transparency that tear us with wonder. -MICHAEL EIGEN, author of Under the Totem: In Search of a Path andContact with the Depths In Kafka's Ax, Marc Kaminsky interweaves prose fiction and poetry with such grace and such remarkable feats of imaginative and sometimes parodic mimicry that one is never entirely sure of the border between genres. This book is for anyone who appreciates the craft of writing and how the language of poetry and prose can come together. -JACK KUGELMASS, author of The Miracle of Intervale Avenue

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