The Apparatus of Visible Things by Hila Ratzabi

$14.00

 

Hila Ratzabi’s poems are pleasurable because they are so finely balanced. They are wonderful because of what they balance so finely–a concrete, expressive love for the sensuous details of the world with an equally evolved, equally startling capacity for rumination, abstraction, and metaphysical grandeur.”

–Vijay Seshadri

 

Hila Ratzabi reminds us that Pessoa, like Wittgenstein, is one of the many who suggested the radical optical world when introspection seemed doomed. But her own poetry meets the data that perception and consciousness are twins and married and embrace: think, look. Her world contains babies, boys, air conditioners, and desks, but it is also a notebook of unanswerable questions. Out of these carnal doubts she makes a faithful late language … Hila turns her painterly poems into a mountain, into mounds of ideas.”

–David Shapiro

 

“I have read (and reread) these craft-wise poems. They are simultaneously strangely imaged–extraordinarily so–while accessible and wonderfully lyric. Even more important are the questions this poet asks of us: relentless, but mostly heavenly, fearful, and hope-filled.”

–Kate Knapp Johnson

 

 

Category:

Description

The Apparatus of Visible Things

by Hila Ratzabi

$14, paper

Hila Ratzabi was a finalist for the Fourth Genre Steinberg Essay Prize (2019) and for the Fifth Annual Narrative Magazine Poetry Contest (2013). She is the author of a chapbook, The Apparatus of Visible Things (2009). Her essays have appeared in the Ten Percent Happier blog, the Wisdom Daily, the Jewish Daily Forward, Kveller, Alma, Mutha Magazine, and others. Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Linebreak, Drunken Boat, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, The Normal School, and other journals. Her poetry also appears in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She has received scholarships and fellowships to the Willapa Bay AiR residency, the Vermont Studio Center, the Crater Lake National Park residency, and the Arctic Circle Residency.

She is the former editor-in-chief and poetry editor of the literary journal Storyscape (2011–2017) and the founder of the Red Sofa Salon & Poetry Workshop. She is the Managing Editor of Ritualwell.org, and a freelance editor and writing coach. She currently lives in Rehovot, Israel.

Ratzabi holds an MFA in Poetry Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (2007), a BA in English from Barnard College (2003), and a BA in Jewish Philosophy from the Jewish Theological Seminary (2003).

Reviews

There are no reviews yet.

Be the first to review “The Apparatus of Visible Things by Hila Ratzabi”

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *