anna rabinowitz
Words on the Street
Tupelo Press 2016 | 978-1-936797-80-6
WORDS ON THE STREET is a book-length poem and a mystery. The “crime” involves all humanity. The landscape, choked with graffiti, teems with hearsay and falsehood. An infant, Baby, is abducted, and the Seven Deadly Sins plague mankind with threat and insecurity.
A fly upends freedom. Gluttony battles death. Greed gallops through the streets. Time degrades. The innocent are denied innocence. Millions wrestle with absurdity as the new reality. Some suspects plunge to the sea. Others act up or act out to sound alarm. Never has our conundrum between two whys begged for a solution more vigorously.
WORDS ON THE STREET is not a book for the faint of heart. It is to be read at the peril of complacency, for the sake of urgency—not to confuse but to alert.
Anna Rabinowitz won the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize of the 2017 New England Poetry Club for Words on the Street.
Praise for Words on the Street
“Anna Rabinowitz at her highest, boldest register.”
—Timothy Donnelly
Present Tense
Omnidawn 2010 | 978-1-890650-45-2
Present Tense is a tour de force, a book length poetic project that functions as anatomy, history, testimony, eulogy, and divining rod of our constantly evolving present moment—exposing not only its various socio-religious-political ecosystems but also the myriad echoes of those systems that resound in our psyches and permeate our thoughts. Incorporating dialogue, reportage, Biblical reference, interview, famous speech, infamous cultural event and more, Rabinowitz offers to readers a deft account of who and what we are as humans—in all of our darkness and our brilliance. This poetry—with its invigorating breadth and shocking immediacy—compels its readers’ full engagement with the page, an interaction that incites us to examine our own position and potential in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of the actual, as we live it—moment by moment.
Praise for Present Tense
From Huffington Post:
The 17 Most Important Poetry Books of Fall 2010.
“Fall 2010 has been a great season for poetry…with politically charged poetry by Anna Rabinowitz…there's much to be excited about, and these selections give a fair indication of the presses putting out the most important poetry of the day.”
From Publishers Weekly:
“The notes section in Rabinowitz's fourth collection—a searing book-length poem in four parts—reveals the great range of historic individuals and texts quoted and reworked: among them, Woody Allen, Sun Tsu, Chief Seattle, the Book of Proverbs, and declassified CIA counterintelligence interrogation manuals.”
From Tillalala Chronicals:
“We live in interesting times. Economic collapse, environmental catastrophe, climate change, endless war, and here in the U.S. an attack on the middle class by a cabal of psychopathic plutocrats. People are starved for something other than shopping malls and slick choreography. Present Tense, the title of Anna Rabinowitz’s new collection of poetry, presents a present tense of heaving geometries and 'pellets of time'. We are out of time, in time, on time, claimed by time, wrestling with time, dreading time, shredding time, shedding time, sparing and spearing and spending time.”
From Nouspique:
“In her latest volume of poetry, Present Tense, Anna Rabinowitz faces squarely the matter of temporal alienation. Even the title deserves our pause. At first glance, it looks like a simple reference to simple grammar. We often write and think and speak in present tense. It is the mode of everyday commerce. But we readily see the double entendre, accentuated by the fact that the cover’s text is distorted: the present is tense.”
From Quintessence:
“This stunning work of lucid but uncomfortable insight, and her use of powerful, transforming imagery and language, has resonated in my subconsciousness for days.”
The Wanton Sublime:
A Florilegium of
Whethers and WondersTupelo Press 2006 | 978-1-932195-39-2
In her dazzling third volume of poetry, Anna Rabinowitz creates nothing short of a new genre of utterance as she cuts through pieties and myths to get at the essential humanity of the Virgin Mary, and, ultimately, of all women.
The Wanton Sublime is an “anthology” of texts and commentaries that propels us on a breathtaking journey mapped by conversations, and speculations—a journey to the very foundations of womanhood and motherhood.
Again and again Mary, exemplar of the feminine, quintessential mother, bearer/birther of divinity is re-visioned and re-defined; she is made kindred to Io, to Europa and to an ancient Egyptian woman who may have been the first unflinchingly assertive feminist. Rabinowitz investigates Mary as concept and as fact, as symbol and as flesh-and-blood female.
What does it mean to be chosen? How does one engage with otherness? What forces operate when one’s life is interrupted? Are there possibilities of alternative narratives? How does one process the condition of not knowing? Linguistically brilliant and stylistically inventive, this daring work makes the universal particular, the particular universal.
The Wanton Sublime explores the burden, the dilemma and the glory of being as it leads us to a renewed appreciation of what it means to be alive and a woman.
Praise for The Wanton Sublime
From Publishers Weekly:
“Rabinowitz investigates the mysteries, myths and cultural accretions around the Virgin Mary in this third collection; Mary becomes, in these rapt and provocative poems, both a symbol of ecstatic transcendence and a focus for questions about gender and power.”
From Booklist:
“Rabinowitz is a highly intellectual poet with unique vision and a distinct voice. She knows the rules of poetry and breaks them beautifully, bending words and forms to her purpose. Some readers will find Rabinowitz challenging, but all will be sent on a journey into fresh poetic and philosophical territory.”
From Library Journal:
“Often using a series of responses, reflections, and interpretations to ancient florilegium (a collection of excerpts), Rabinowitz writes about the Annunciation and Mary, who says, ’Though I be mute, unseen, do not be ignorant of me.’ Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.”
From Jacket Magazine:
“Though we have a handful of contemporary poets, as well as not so contemporary influences, to thank for this new wave in poetry‘s ocean, we can glean much about the movement, if it be one, through a singe poet and her third and latest collection of verse: Anna Rabinowitz and The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders.”
From How2:
“In her most recent book of poetry, The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders, Anna Rabinowitz makes physically present the Annunciation, the moment at which Mary was told she would bear Christ.…she creates a tension between mysticism and physicality, proposing a possible amalgam of the two, where Mary can be both divine and real, metaphor and actuality, transcendent and corporeal.”
From Blogcritics:
“In her third volume of poetry, The Wanton Sublime, Anna Rabinowitz creates an extended meditation upon the Annunciation — the moment that starts everything in traditional Christian believing — the moment the angel Gabriel appears to a young Mary and tells her she's going to be the mother of God.”
From The Catholic Register of Canada:
“To those who have a firm view of Mary’s role in salvation history, some of the poems’ stark imagery may appear to push the boundaries, but to those who want to probe deeper into their faith, The Wanton Sublime poses challenges that may even strengthen their belief.”
Darkling: A Poem
Tupelo Press 2001 | 0-9710310-4-5
Finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Award for Best Poetry Book of 2001.
2011 marked the launch and international distribution of Darkling as a CD on the Albany Records label.
2013 marks the publication of Anna Rabinowitz: DARKLING, Gedicht & Oper, by luxbooks.americana, Weisbaden Germany. A German translation by Barbara Felicitas Tax, Darkling was released as a set including 2 CDs of the full opera.
Darkling: A Poem has garnered ongoing praise since its publication in 2001. Hailed by Booklist as “...a piercing and powerful incantation” of the voices of her family’s Holocaust victims, Darkling’s poetry of accumulation - is a profound processing of loss and aftermath - affirming memory, ceremony, and life itself. Timothy Donnelly, in his introduction of Rabinowitz at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, asserted that the poet presents the reader with “a new form of remembering,” what she herself describes as an “inheritance of truncated histories” and “sketchy memories” discovered in an old shoebox.
American Opera Projects has transformed Darkling into an experimental opera-theatre work that blurs distinctions between poetry, theater, and music, challenging conventional modes of narrative as well as familiar approaches to opera and theater. This groundbreaking production had its world premiere to great critical acclaim on February 26, 2006 at the 13th St. Theatre, NYC where it ran for three weeks. Excerpts from this “new form of theater art” were performed in November, 2005, along with panel discussions, as part of the Works and Process at the Guggenheim series. Read More. A concert version was performed at the German Consulate, NYC, in June, 2006, and the work toured in a concert version to The Freie Universität in Berlin and to Poland in 2007. Darkling was performed by The City Opera at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2009.
Previously, Darkling had another life as a sound/theater piece, which was featured at Barnard College in April 2002 at the national conference, "Women Poets in Performance, the Poetry of Plays: From Gertrude Stein to the Present."
Praise for Darkling
From Publishers Weekly:
“This dense, unsettling volume makes a unique contribution to Holocaust literature.”
From San Francisco Chronicle:
“In this book-length poem, Anna Rabinowitz assembles a stirring testament to the impossibility of memory.”
From Boston Review:
“…not a book of poems, nor even a single long poem, but a single poetic gesture, a linguistic act…an extraordinarily intense experiment in language and the emotional freighting of…lives”
From American Book Review:
“Darkling borrows from narrative in its implicit drama and occasional dialogue, but it is in no way a chronicle or family album. It has more in common with the two columns of light that penetrated the night over Manhattan in memoriam to the World Trade Towers. It is a monument, yes, but a very imponderable and disembodied one.”
At the Site
of Inside Out
University of Massachusetts Press 1997 | 1-55849-093-0, 1-55849-092-2
Winner of the Juniper Prize
“…language at a height and experience at a depth that the whole art suddenly appears as a plinth on the plain of American letters.” —Molly Peacock
“At the Site of Inside Out splendidly enriches the site of American poetry.” —Ann Lauterbach
Praise for
At the Site of Inside outFrom Denver Quarterly:
“Like Penelope at the door of the millennium, and against all historical odds, Rabinowitz confounds both traditional ideas of closure and postmodern glorification of release, in favor of the pilgrimage that all great writing undertakes…an astonishing book…poem after poem testifies to the inevitable physical relationship between language and life.”
From Harvard Review:
“…a dazzling, confident debut.”
From Chicago Tribune:
“…formal invention, linguistic brilliance… blissful marriages of form and content.”
From Publishers Weekly:
“…teem[s] with the specificity of daily life against a more blurry background of human longing and emotion.”
From Boston Review:
“In her first collection, Rabinowitz proves herself an intelligent witness to grief, both her own and this century’s. She is drawn to forbidden spaces in living experience, language, and visual art, and devises novel means to enter them.”
From Quintessence:
“This stunning work of lucid but uncomfortable insight, and her use of powerful, transforming imagery and language, has resonated in my subconsciousness for days.”
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