Harriet Rubin’s Mother’s Wooden Hand
9780226313016
9780226312996
Harriet Rubin’s Mother’s Wooden Hand
Redolent of Chicago’s ethnic culture, Susan Hahn’s intensely personal lyrics emerge from the world of an extended Jewish family and its neighbors. The voices of these immigrants are imbued with the profound effects and memories of the journey "From a patrolled town in the Ukraine/to Baltimore on a boat, then a train to Chicago." Hahn’s poetry is about love and the lack of love, about rejection, and about other forces—generational, political, social, and sexual—that overwhelm individuals and cause them to limit themselves both physically and psychologically.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Claustrophobia
For Adam, Who, Had He Been Born, Would Have Killed Himself
The Blue Porcelain Bird
Trichotillomania
Harriet Rubin’s Mother’s Wooden Hand
Melancholia
The Tonsure
The Lamedvovniks
Waiting on the Gate
The Woman Who Wrote the Alphabet
Schizophrenia
Who We Are to Each Other
The Bookkeeper and His Daughter
Looking Out on Africa
Hysteria
Memories of the Pleasure
Circumcision
What She Saw, What She Thought
Paranoia
Amphibians
Small Green
Agoraphobia
The House in Plano
The Death of a Small Animal
Creation—The Last Day
Since Then
At the Intersection
Dorsey Road
Given Name
After Chemotherapy
Shavings
Deals with the Universe
Flowers
Of Tulips and Trillium
The Picture I Never Gave Her
Stigmata
Feuerstein
Fourth of July Summer
Sophie
Lana Turner in the Butcher Shop
HOllycourt 5-7434
Anna of Devon Avenue
Psalm
The Astonishment of Being Alive
Claustrophobia
For Adam, Who, Had He Been Born, Would Have Killed Himself
The Blue Porcelain Bird
Trichotillomania
Harriet Rubin’s Mother’s Wooden Hand
Melancholia
The Tonsure
The Lamedvovniks
Waiting on the Gate
The Woman Who Wrote the Alphabet
Schizophrenia
Who We Are to Each Other
The Bookkeeper and His Daughter
Looking Out on Africa
Hysteria
Memories of the Pleasure
Circumcision
What She Saw, What She Thought
Paranoia
Amphibians
Small Green
Agoraphobia
The House in Plano
The Death of a Small Animal
Creation—The Last Day
Since Then
At the Intersection
Dorsey Road
Given Name
After Chemotherapy
Shavings
Deals with the Universe
Flowers
Of Tulips and Trillium
The Picture I Never Gave Her
Stigmata
Feuerstein
Fourth of July Summer
Sophie
Lana Turner in the Butcher Shop
HOllycourt 5-7434
Anna of Devon Avenue
Psalm
The Astonishment of Being Alive