Naked Beside Fish by Yiskah Rosenfeld

Yiskah Rosenfeld’s marvelous ekphrastic-themed poems turn a poet’s eye on paintings and a painterly eye on the details of her own life.  “Look and you’ll find me/an upside down angel in white,” she writes, finding herself in a Chagall painting.  Brushstroke by brushstroke she builds a narrative of longing and listening in which inscape and landscape merge.

–David Shaddock, author of The Book of Splendor and Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field.

In this evocative chapbook, Yiskah Rosenfeld does the magic of translation, taking readers inside works of art. In her hands, Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings,” already transmogrified from canvas to music by John Cage, now enter the realm of poetry, or at least its promise, in the opening poem “Poetry Submission Guidelines.” The stark white canvas, white page, and ambient sound become our way into this collection. These are fully embodied, visceral poems that do not shy away from the pleasures and the challenges of bodies, especially the gestating body and its beauty.

–Laura Levitt, professor of religion, Jewish studies, and gender at Temple University, author of The Objects that Remain (2020).

Wordworks inspired by Kahlo, Klee, and other twentieth-century artists aside, what Naked Beside Fish brings to ekphrastic poetry is the incorporation of canvas-dynamic locales. A studio in Jerusalem creates “ladders of light angling through your morning windows.” A Sausalito museum annotates “That xylophone wind / awakening the pines.” Self-portraiture is a several-paletted thing. On Rosenfeld’s easel it’s an ultrasound, constellation-assisted journaling, “Bones under skin, gathered and sacked like garlic.” Rosenfeld’s chapbook masterclass attracts patrons for seasons to come.

–Jon Riccio, author of Agoreography (2022)