The Lowercase Jew
(Northwestern University Press, August 2003)

AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE:

"The celebrations and angels and vaudeville and holocaustal suffering, the Torah-learning and hora-dancing and blessings and bar-mitzvah noshing and mourning and high meshuges. . .are all here, with a fresh wit and the winds of a timeless poignancy crafted into them. These are soulful poems. . .and some, a bissel kickass."

-- Albert Goldbarth

These exuberant, rich, vastly funny and vastly serious poems  cover the whole ground of Jewish life, low and high-- from rye bread and borscht to the Holocaust, from the anti-Semitism of the modernists to the robbery of a pharmacist. Kamenetz frames in subtle terms the questions that haunt our time-about the identity of poet and poetry and the capacity of art to harm and to heal. Drawing on personal history, Torah and mysticism to explore the tangled relations of Jewish identity and modern life, Kamenetz's poems attest to the inexorable power of language-and of joy.

"The Lowercase Jew Beliefnet Interview

Read the title poem, "The Lowercase Jew" at Exquisite Corpse.

Also don't miss Allen Ginsberg Forgives Ezra Pound on Behalf of the Jews", in The Forward.

"The poem on Ginsberg and Pound is magnificent; the poem on T.S.E. is worth the price of admission; and "Uncle Louis;" and "Rye;" and "Tours of Heaven." Read."

-- Gerald Stern

"The Lowercase Jew is a book dense with mourning, comedy routines, food, blue tattoos. tribal history and the wheel of time, despair and prayer. It begins with three amazing poems on T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism, Allen Ginsberg's forgiveness of Ezra Pound and an imaginary Holocaust Theme Park and ends with an amazing poem on happiness, riffing on the Bible's first psalm." 

--Alicia Ostriker

"Rodger Kamenetz is on a spiritual pilgrimage that feels both urgent and timeless. After finding the "missing Jew" of his early poetry at the crossroads of Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism, Kamenetz is now taking on the mantle of the warrior. His new work militates powerfully for the splendor of the Jewish tradition, taking on without hesitation the cultural icons whose malign influence is far from spent. Jewish urgency and Jewish wisdom are combined here to stand poetically firm in another uncertain age."

--Andrei Codrescu

ALSO BY RODGER KAMENETZ:

TERRA INFIRMA: A MEMOIR OF MY MOTHER'S LIFE IN MINE

AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE:

"A haunting memoir, deeply felt, poignant, tragic-- funny-- powerful, and memorable for the poetic precision of its language."-- WALKER PERCY

"Terra Infirma" is not a narrative in the standard sense of a chronological ordering of events. It is inclined to circle its main subject in a poetic meandering through the meaning and the mystery of a particular mother's character and the way it imprints itself on her son.

"Kamenetz's slender volume is an impressively intelligent, maturely perceptive and learned meandering, and it has made for a strange and moving book."

-- Richard Bernstein, The New York Times.

"I would be hard pressed to name anyone who has written as beautifully and profoundly about death and family as Rodger Kamenetz in this remarkable memoir. Terra Infirma is a sweet miracle of a book."  

 -- Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"I love this book. It is a powerful testament to the forces of life, will, and love. [T]his memoir will move the soul of anyone born of mother. It is highly rewarding and illuminating to read."    

-- Robert A. Thurman, author of Inner Revolution

"Remembering his search for the separateness that would allow him to become an adult, Kamenetz writes fiercely and movingly. A classic story, beautifully told."    

-- Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After

"One cannot be freed from a mother's possessive love merely by her death, without confronting one's own story. Kamenetz was willing to go through this process of liberation, and thanks to his honesty, courage, and skill as a writer, we have this absorbing and vivid account of his rescue from the silence that obscured his mother's past."    

-- Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child

"Entirely under the spell of deep feeling, yet never relinquishing the irony of complex intelligence, this is one of the most beautiful books ever written about a mother and a son."    

-- Philip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body

THE MISSING JEW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE:

"Mr. Kamenetz has become one of the of the most formidable of Jewish voices of American poetry. The Missing Jew is the most significant book of American Jewish poetry to appear this year. .. Mr. Kamenetz recovers Jewishness as a field for discourse, not sentimentalized imagery. In direct and imaginative address, he puts the question of Jewishness under discussion with large parts of honesty and humor."

-- The Forward, December 11, 1992.

"Rodger Kamenetzs poems whirl and shake on the page. He is the poet of the living history of unspeakable names and his book, The Missing Jew, sings with dark with the tales of tough family spirits."

-- Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine

"These are very exciting and original poems about a world that has been written about so many times. These poems are a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew."

-- Yehuda Amichai, Israels leading poet.