ESTHER SCHOR, a poet and professor of English at Princeton University, won the National Jewish Book Award for Emma Lazarus.  A specialist in British Romanticism, her scholarship includes Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria and The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. She is soon to complete a book on the past and present of the Esperanto movement, forthcoming from Metropolitan Books.  Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, Raritan and the Forward. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.


"In the world of Esther Schor's poems, everything seems closer:  Budapest jostles New Jersey, Spanish leaks into English, the human nestles up to the animal, our senses fill to crowding.  We're touched almost literally by a language that's smoothed, stroked, twisted, sheared, like some rough silk.  From the primal investigations of 'Harvest' to the brilliant improbabilities of 'Hearsay,' from the sublime vistas of 'Zion' to the lyric precision of  'Come Down, My Heart,' Strange Nursery is extraordinary in its range of music and insight."—James Richardson