Praise for Clattering East

In his first chapbook, Clattering East, Dennis Kirschbaum writes with clear speech and infallable rhetoric of holy lands: their ritual and ruin; their volatility and never-changingness. The holy lands lie to the east of our lives, and to get there we must travel over rough terrain, clattering with stories and rejoicing from within our bodies, our modes of transport. At times we're heading to a literal east--a land of Nod separate from idyllic unity, fraught with camps and their atrocities--but also to a metaphorical, contemplative one, from which there rises, out of the pure act of attention, the sun of consciousness and responsibility.

     David Keplinger

Dennis Kirschbaum gracefully blends imagery that is foreign and familiar. In a poem spoken by Biblical Ishmael, prayers are whispered into ATM machines. In another, a pie “towering with meringue” is a metaphor for a marriage about to crumble. Kirschbaum’s poems explore rites of passage–not just of youth, but of parenthood and marriage, often using his Jewish faith as a foundation for understanding. Kirschbaum’s Clattering East is laugh out loud funny (“X-Men,” “Holy”), tempered with haunting tributes to his family’s immigrant history.

     Laura Shovan, author of Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone, inaugural winner of the Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize.

Clattering East is wisdom literature to quell the rancor of our era. Its author, Dennis Kirschbaum, emerges in these finely crafted stanzas as a 21st century sage invoking calm and patience with wit and pathos. It is rare to find the familial fecund, and rarer still to hear such probity in a contemporary voice. I admire these poems very much.

     Daniel Y. Harris, author of Hyperlinks of Anxiety and Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue.