Rooted and Reduced to Dust by Ivy Raff

$17.99

 

“Observant, challenging, sensuous, glowing with an undercarriage of mystique, Raff’s poems are torsos that twist to embrace the universe.  Every muscled line is taut, knowing its desire and how to hold what it loves in its arms.”
–Jimmy Santiago Baca, American Book Award-winning author of Martin and Meditations on the South Valley 

 

Ivy Raff writes a poetry of relentless inquiry into the past. She subjects her ‘generational history of displacement’ to a restorative poetic justice and joy. The investigation scrutinizes. It is lacerating, honest, an inquest, finally, into the strength of love as it is conducted through the body into the poem. I find these poems fearless in tracing the map of the journey from Jerusalem to Far Rockaway to Detroit, establishing a new place full of potential. These poems are alive.”
–Bruce Smith, author of The Other Lover, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

 

Ivy Raff‘s powerful collection reveals complex and universal themes of love, loss, family, and yearnings.  The pages of her collection conjure life’s experiences with profound intimacy.  Raff’s insightfulness is provocative.”
–Sarah Birnbach, author of A Daughter’s Kaddish: My Year of Grief, Devotion, and Healing

 

 

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Rooted and Reduced to Dust

by Ivy Raff

Paper

List: $17.99

979-8-88838-376-6

2024

Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

So begins Ivy Raff‘s debut poetry chapbook, which plumbs the depths of movement, of growth: from one generation to the next, from Eastern Europe across America, from sickness to health.  With braided fearlessness and vulnerability, Raff bridges the past with the heartbreaking tenderness of today.

Ivy Raff is the author of What Remains/Qué queda (Editorial DALYA, forthcoming 2026), a bilingual English/Spanish poetry collection that won the Alberola International Poetry Prize, and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024), hailed by Pulitzer finalist Bruce Smith as “lacerating, fearless.”  Poems and translations appear in such journals as Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Iron Horse Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature, and International Poetry Review, as well as anthologies London Independent Story Prize Anthology (LISP, 2023), and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize Annual (Aesthetica, 2023).   Her Best of the Net-nominated work has garnered support from the Colgate Writers’ Conference, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, the New York Mills Cultural Center, and Under the Volcano.  Ivy serves artist communities as MacDowell’s Senior Digital Systems Strategist.  For the last decade, her advocacy efforts have focused on Palestinian Liberation.  Read more at www.ivyraff.com.

 

 

 

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