Kirjahaku

Winner of the 1999 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, selected by Charles Simic."The art of prosody, of which Deborah Tall is a master, is a jeweler's art. It is about ascertaining the weight of words, measuring each one of them in turn against silence and time. . . . As we read, line by line, sounds turn into music, words and images grow in meaning. If you believe that this is what all poets do anyway, you are wrong. Only the best of them know how to make us reread with increasing pleasure a few lines of poetry." —from the Foreword by Charles Simic

Winner of the 1999 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, selected by Charles Simic."The art of prosody, of which Deborah Tall is a master, is a jeweler's art. It is about ascertaining the weight of words, measuring each one of them in turn against silence and time. . . . As we read, line by line, sounds turn into music, words and images grow in meaning. If you believe that this is what all poets do anyway, you are wrong. Only the best of them know how to make us reread with increasing pleasure a few lines of poetry." —from the Foreword by Charles Simic

“Without self-absorption, Tall traces the self’s emergence in a place which she recognized from the start as her testing place.”—Seamus Heaney “In the literature of place, Deborah Tall’s book stands out for its delicacy, range of learning, and refreshing frankness.”—Phillip Lopate In her third book of nonfiction, Deborah Tall explores the genealogy of the missing. Haunted by her orphaned father’s abandonment by his extended family, his secretive, walled-off trauma and absent history, she sets off in pursuit of the family he claims not to have. From the dutiful happiness of Levittown in the 1950s to a stricken former shtetl in Ukraine, we follow Tall’s journey through evasions and lies. Reflecting on family secrecy, postwar American culture, and the urge for roots, Tall’s search uncovers not just a missing family but an understanding of the part family and history play in identity. A Family of Strangers is Tall’s life’s work, told in such exacting, elegant language that the suppressed past vividly asserts its place in the present. Deborah Tall is the author of four books of poems, most recently Summons, published by Sarabande Books after Charles Simic chose it for the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. She has also published two previous two books of nonfiction, The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island and From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, and co-edited the anthology The Poet's Notebook with Stephen Kuusisto and David Weiss. Tall has taught writing and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and edited its literary journal, Seneca Review, since 1982. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband David Weiss and their two daughters.

“Without self-absorption, Tall traces the self’s emergence in a place which she recognized from the start as her testing place.”—Seamus Heaney “In the literature of place, Deborah Tall’s book stands out for its delicacy, range of learning, and refreshing frankness.”—Phillip Lopate In her third book of nonfiction, Deborah Tall explores the genealogy of the missing. Haunted by her orphaned father’s abandonment by his extended family, his secretive, walled-off trauma and absent history, she sets off in pursuit of the family he claims not to have. From the dutiful happiness of Levittown in the 1950s to a stricken former shtetl in Ukraine, we follow Tall’s journey through evasions and lies. Reflecting on family secrecy, postwar American culture, and the urge for roots, Tall’s search uncovers not just a missing family but an understanding of the part family and history play in identity. A Family of Strangers is Tall’s life’s work, told in such exacting, elegant language that the suppressed past vividly asserts its place in the present.