“Sarah Stern is a poet to watch and relish.”

{WE HAVE BEEN LUCKY IN THE MIDST OF MISFORTUNE}

Review by Dana Robbins, Calyx, Vol 31: 2, Summer / Fall 2019

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Review by Sandee Brawarsky, The Jewish Week (August 27, 2019)

“To Get At Things At A Slant”
New Volumes From Jewish Poets

A roots journey to Germany sparks Sarah Stern’s new book of poetry…

Sarah Stern stumbled upon what would become the title of her new book of poetry while visiting Germany for the first time in 2014, and traveling to Rexingen, the town where her mother was born. Her mother and her parents left in 1939, after Kristallnacht, when her grandfather was arrested and sent to Dachau for four weeks. Stern found the town to be as beautiful as her late mother had described it, like a fairy tale.

In the Jewish cemetery, she found the grave of her great-great-grandparents; the family had lived in Rexingen for 400 years. Now there are no Jews. A gentile couple who took it upon themselves to preserve the town’s Jewish history guided her around the Jewish museum they created, and showed her family photographs and two letters written by her grandfather Julius — a corporal who was awarded the Iron Cross and other military medals for his service in World War I — to the town’s mayor. Julius described the horror of war and said, as she quotes in a poem, “And yet, over and over again, /we have been lucky in the midst of misfortune.” The letters were in their original envelopes, with patterned liners, which are reproduced on the cover of her new book.

In her third book of poetry, “We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune” (Kelsay Books), Stern dedicates one of five parts of the volume to her trip to Germany. In other poems, she writes about growing up — she was the youngest of seven children, with six older brothers — and about memory, among other themes. Her late mother has a profound presence in these poems. With empathy, Stern also writes about encounters in daily life, one with a UPS man who pays for her meter and won’t take her change, saying, “‘I got plenty in the truck.’/ Sometimes a sentence/ Makes you love a stranger.”

Her poems are like short stories, some more like photographs, capturing a moment in time, in detail, as it will never be again. Most are free verse, as she explains in an interview in Manhattan, “within them a pattern and rhythm that I try to stick with, that pushes the language for me.” Stern, who also teaches poetry, tries to strip language to its essence.

“What I love about poetry,” she says, “is that it allows me to get at things at a slant.” She says that her mother’s garden was always mixed up, never in rows, and that poetry allows her to write like that, in ways that one can’t in prose. A graduate of journalism school, she ways journalism and poetry are similar in the preciseness they require, and the value of listening well.

After journalism school, she worked at the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) for six years as a staff writer on its newspaper, interviewing union members and taking photographs.

“The job made me appreciate my experience — I met so many people who were first-generation Americans, working with their hands, as my mother did.”

In the poem “On Audubon Avenue,” she writes, “When she was young/the Irish bus driver/ waited for her/ on Audubon Avenue, en route/to her Local 65 job. / She’d run, red hair and freckles, / letting go, turning into an American.”

Stern’s mother was a proud union member. Later on, while in her 50s, when Sarah went to Barnard, her mother took her GED and went on to graduate from Lehman College.

In “My Little Life,” Stern writes, “Mother would say as long as there is something on the table to eat/ Yes, that’s true, but/ After we have that, we get to look around at who is sitting with/ Let us praise them and the light too.”

As a poet, she’s proud and grateful to have a voice, and says, “Speaking as a woman, as a Jewish woman, having that opportunity and to be alive at this time — I can write. It wasn’t always that way. And it matters.”
♦
Full review: https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/to-get-at-things-at-a-slant/
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Review by Judith Swann, Compulsive Reader (March 4, 2019)

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{BUT TODAY IS DIFFERENT}

Review by Katrinka Moore, Mom Egg Review

“But Today is Different” by Sarah Stern (Resource Publications) is a collection of 60 eloquent poems. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the poet’s mother, and many of the poems evoke  presence and memory, loss and death, elevating ordinary moments into holiness and beauty.

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{ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE}

Review by Deborah Schoeneman, Jewish Book World

Love is ephemeral. To stop and appreciate each moment of our memories—the “now” moment—and the future of love in all its myriad forms describes Sarah Stern’s poetry. In “A Spring for Einstein,” for example, we read the personification of love, “All matter returns to energy/Faint light trolling through the universe/Open the window by your bed/Watch the curtains lift/That breeze was once you.” Yet amidst this beauty lies the juxtaposing, ever-looming presence of suffering and death that must be accepted as part of loving. In “From the Journal Entries of Sergeant Anthony Jones, Age 25,” Jones writes that he knows he will be killed due to inadequate equipment and no parts to fix the trucks while his grandmother stares at his picture with anger, thinking the right order is that she should have gone first, an age-old feeling that is no less potent with love no matter how often heard. A child’s questions in another poem focus on the possibility of an afterlife, quickly followed by the child’s total engagement in the wind and speed of a bike ride, a loving, thrilling experience in itself. Sarah Stern is a poet to watch and relish.

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Poetics of Riverdale
Reviewed by Jake Marmer, The Forward

When we think of great New York poets — Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Laurie Anderson, among others — what they’ve immortalized and exalted have been the streets and energies of Manhattan or, on rare and less transcendent occasions, Brooklyn. The Bronx, when it did appear, has always been something of the old country — where immigrant parents and grandparents lived, a remote, provincial satellite. And certainly Riverdale, Bronx’s sleepy neighborhood with a large Jewish population, would appear to have nothing to offer to poetic imagination. Judith Baumel, featured on The Arty Semite last year, seem to have been the only exception.

And yet, Sarah Stern’s recent collection of poems, “Another Word for Love,” is profoundly grounded in Riverdale — in its subway stations and parks, buildings and streets. The first of the two poems featured today, “Morning Prayer,” takes place on the streets of the neighborhood, and features a curious juxtaposition of spiritual experiences, genders and visions. The second piece, “Reentry,” is an homage to exceptional character, evoked so vividly that he practically walks (or rather, waddles) off the lines of the poem.

Morning Prayer: Riverdale, July 2006

Saturday morning and the men
hurry to synagogue with their tallit bags,
I’m jogging past them

thinking about things the way you can
when you know your route,
a military maneuver,

played over in your mind’s eye again and again
until all you’re left with is the after-space,
your feet simply punctuation,

a line break
on the curve to nothing.
Pray for peace, that’s it.

Pray like the squirrel in the grass
with a crab apple in his mouth,
gooseberries barely visible in the thicket,

starlings splashing in pot holes,
the old woman who walks with a cane
to the market for the morning paper,

yellow blossoms turning into tomatoes,
green globes, new planets waiting,
waiting to be named.

Reentry

Paul Cymerman, a local retired butcher, became the unofficial “Mayor of Henry Hudson Park” in 1989….

— City of New York Parks and Recreation Plaque, December 2000

Each morning Paul unlocks
the gates, swings the metal chain
over the top of the door and
opens the playground.

He makes sure the sand is clean,
turns the toy motorcycles
over before rain. On summer
days when the sun’s out,

you can see the numbers
up his arm frozen beneath
his skin like fish below ice,
almost alive. He still wears

a pin that reads “The Butcher.”
He says he’s got a good
connection with his Maker.
“Don’t jump on the park benches.

Don’t throw sand in the sprinkler,”
he tells the children
as he stands in his black shoes
and creates a periodic table of

his own elements. Toward evening
he walks with his wife beside him.
She holds on to his arm.
Eve, had she grown old in the garden.

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Reviewed by Ellen Miller-Mack, Verse Wisconsin

Sarah Stern asks resonant questions, dropped like pebbles in a deep lake from a rock on which she balances with grace.  Picture concentric circles— these are the fluid poems inAnother Word for Love.

The opening poem, “A Spring for Einstein” floats a rather cosmic idea on a stream of images, arriving at “that breeze was once you” with remarkable clarity and a unique perspective.

Another switch of perspective yields the poet’s exploration of that irresistible urge to fly in verse, in “With Henry Hudson”: “I’m not cold, so light, effortless / then I wake and know // I’m no longer a child gliding // over telephone lines, / dogs on the hill,” soaring beyond dream-space.”

“Saw Mill River Bike Path”, an expertly paced poem, begins with a stark question: “My daughter asks when you die / do you stop feeling anything” then carries the  reader back in time, to a very specific  experience many  of us have had—learning to ride a bike. As the wheels turn, Stern modestly yet deftly conjures the cycle of life.

Another poem which deals with mortality is “Riding the Bus from Manhattan”, crafting autumn’s waning light and “the Harlem River gulls” afloat through:

Yankee Stadium

The Auto Parts Store

The Providence Rug Company

Beato’s Professional Hair Braiding

St Matthew’s School

It’s a human world they glide through “like royalty.”  The poet’s guileless (and very human) question is answered, as they “suddenly rise up / in unison and head for shore.”

There is sweetness to Sarah Stern’s gentle probing of life, including her poems about war. “From the Journal Entries of Sergeant Anthony Jones, age 25”:

Grieve little and move on.

Sergeant Jones knew he wouldn’t

return.  Kelly found his diaries

after he had spent two weeks at home.

I shall be looking over you.

“Empty” is paradoxically filled with the unwieldy weight of sadness, beginning with the personal and domestic: “I’m empty like a spoon next to / a fork that’s beside a knife.” The knife as a symbol of violence begins to haunt, as the poem turns to a different daughter and mother as well as a husband killed in the war in Iraq.

Another Word for Love, Sarah Stern’s first chapbook, is filled with love for life and family, with a cultural Jewishness that I find warm and welcome, writing this on the first night of Chanukah. Its questions are fundamental and deep, woven into well-wrought poems.

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Reviewed by Sandee Brawarsky, Jewish Woman Magazine

In her first book of poems, Another Word for Love (Finishing Line Press), Sarah Stern looks at the big themes of love, loss and death with a creative and lyrical approach. In her poems, she often notices the angle of light and the passage of time, and reminds readers, “We have one life in this broken world.”

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Reviewed by Sandee Brawarsky, The Jewish Week

Share Beautiful Words

‘Still ours the dance, the feast, the glorious Psalm,/The mystic lights of emblem, and the Word,” Emma Lazarus wrote in “The Feast of Lights.”

Several new volumes of poetry deserve to be read out loud and also savored in silence. Highly recommended are Richard Zimler’s “Love’s Voice: 72 Kabbalistic Haiku” (Tarcher Books), in which the novelist expresses Jewish mystical teachings in the traditional Japanese form of haiku; Riverdale poet Sarah Stern’s “Another Word for Love” (Finishing Line Press), Jake Marmer’s “Jazz Talmud” (Sheep Meadow Press) and Isidore Century’s “Unintended Wanderings Through Torah” (Blue Thread Communications).