Kaddish for My Father: New and Selected Poems 1970-1999

(Paperback)

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An integrated meditation in poetry and prose, this collection is about a working-class European-born Communist who died in 1997, after two years in a nursing home. Passionate and lyrical, Scheier writes of her father's horrifying childhood in pogrom-torn Europe, her years of conflict with him, and the peace they came to in the time before he died. These poems pulse with a beautiful intensity and clarityher meditations on death and the mourner's entry into the land of ghosts and ancestors are haunting, while those that focus on how the world reacted to her father's illness and death are written with heartbreaking honesty.

Author Bio

Libby Scheier is the author of the poetry collections The Larger Life, Second Nature, and SkyA Poem in Four Pieces. Scheier's poetry, fiction, and criticism have appeared in numerous anthologies. She's been a literary columnist at the Toronto Star, and her work has appeared in many periodicals, including The Malahat Review, Descant, The Globe and Mail, and This Magazine. She taught in the creative writing program at York University for seven years and since 1994 has been founder/director of the Toronto Writing Workshop.