Eyes, Stones: Poems

by Elana Bell

Overview

In this debut collection, Eyes, Stones, Elana Bell brings her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to consider the difficult question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The poems invoke characters inexorably linked to the land of Israel and Palestine. There is Zosha, a sharp-witted survivor whose burning hope for a Jewish homeland helps her endure the atrocities of the Holocaust. And there is Amal, a Palestinian whose family has worked their land for over one hundred years — through Turkish, British, Jordanian, and now Israeli rule. Other poems — inspired by interviews conducted by the poet in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and America — examine Jewish and Arab relationships to the land as biblical home, Zionist dream, modern state, and occupied territory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807144640
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	04/16/2012
Series:	Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets
Pages:	74
Sales rank:	450,804
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Elana Bell has conducted poetry workshops for educators, women in prison, and high school students in Israel, Palestine, and throughout the five boroughs of New York City. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, CALYX, and elsewhere. Bell is the writer-in-residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Elana Bell has undertaken a task many others have avoided: facing the agony of the Palestine-Israel conflict and its history. She has done so in the only way it is possible: by writing with the compassionate voice of a translator. She gives her voice over to others without changing her vocabulary or her beat. Elements basic to life — bread, fruit, water, and rats — are here in profusion. These poems are built for our time." — Fanny Howe, judge of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

Original"Elana Bell has undertaken a task many others have avoided: facing the agony of the Palestine-Israel conflict and its history. She has done so in the only way it is possible: by writing with the detached but compassionate voice of a translator. She gives her voice over to others without changing her vocabulary or her beat. Elements basic to life — bread, fruit, water, and rats — are here in profusion. These poems are built for our time." — Fanny Howe, judge of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets