b’siyata d’shira by Shoshana Surek

In the small, the ordinary, the quotidian, Shoshana Surek sees all worlds, all times. A lizard lifting its leg in the American desert now bears witness to Hungarian Jews passing in a train car continents and decades away. In b’siyata d’shira, Surek directs us to what doesn’t change—inhumanity, genocide, lands stolen—but also to what endures—ritual, the search for home, the terrifying beauty of poetry, this heart-stopping collection bearing proof of it all.

–Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade and The Bigness of the World“

B’siyata d’shira is a parallel prayer and meditation on the past and present, bridging Israel and the River Jordan with Denver, Colorado and the River Platte, brilliantly journeying the reader across time in tight lyric and lasting miniatures, through the lens of a mirror reflecting east and west. Shoshana Surek’s wise and rebellious speakers leave fingerprints on the prayer book’s cover; one folds the Torah’s pages into origami; another pens and burns the names of God with a Marlboro cigarette – yet, far from profane, b’siyata d’shira is a profound and beautiful debut.

–Chip Livingston, author of Crow-Blue, Crow-Black and Love, Loosha

Shira, in Hebrew, means “poetry.” Surek’s debut poetry collection, b’siyata d’shira, teaches us about her first language and an ancient language steeped with sorrow and beauty, despair and joy. Her poems are birthed from generations of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, an ancient call rooted deep in her family’s history. While Surek examines her family’s past, we discover ancestry behind language, beauty in small, secret spaces, and genocidal lineage wrapped in imagery so powerful each poem must be digested slowly to taste the full vividness. Surek is a voice so captivating and reassuring; she never once hesitates to take us along on her journey of an ancestral museum while describing each memory and truth with no apologies, as if to say, look, this is my language, these are my ancestors, and this is my tribute to all the dead and the living. Once you finish this collection, you will not be the same person at the beginning, which is exactly what Surek wants. Don’t we all?

–Hillary Leftwich, author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock, Aura, and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook.