Sheep Meadow Press

Yerra Sugarman received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for her first collection, Forms of Gone. Her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, is forthcoming in 2008. Her honors also include a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Bogin Award and Cecil Hemley Award. Her poems, translations and articles have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Nation, ACM, Pleiades, and in French journals, among others. She has taught in the MFA Program at City College (CUNY) as well as in undergraduate Creative Writing programs there, at NYU and at Pratt. Born in Toronto, she lives in New York.

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Yerra Sugarman

Forms of Gone is a powerful first book by a poet mature in experience and worldview, whose strength is drawn at once from a unique perspective and a multilayered engagement with the counterpoint of syntax and poetic measure. Yerra Sugarman is the daughter of Shoah survivors who settled in Canada, and her subject is the overlay and undertow of history on daily life, as it regards that very specific experience, radiating out into a meditation on the palimpsest that is any examined human existence. But first of all, there is the reality she witnessed, as the witnesses themselves began to disappear, with a novelist’s (or a painter’s) eye for wry or heart-wrenching detail, but with a poet’s linguistic compression and invention, with a poet’s genius for re-creating the particular so that in the aftershcok of reading, the reader becomes aware of how much the text also captures a plight that is universally human.

—Marilyn Hacker

Standing at prayer, mourning and grieving, preoccupied with suffering, somehow the poetry of Yerra Sugarman breaks through, functions something like a solar system— around a sun that is Beauty and constant, there moves a planet Clarity of Utterance, there are the planets History and Holocaust, and the twin planets Passion and Eye whose gravitational pulls keep it all in motion, then there is Music (a voice distantly related to a cello), and the planet Language (that like our Venus is the brightest of all), finally there is Decency, which is made of iron and has its own star. This extraordinary display in the literary heavens appears in every poem.

—Stanley Moss