Black Shroud with Rainbow Fringes

In this impressive gathering of fifty poems, Nebenzahl discovers long-lost relatives that were displaced from World War II and the Holocaust. In this unearthing, Nebenzahl finds himself questioning his past and present to imagine a new future in elegiac dimensions. These expressions intertwine and mediate language as a process for divinity, humor, and truth. The poetry excavates with humanity the trauma of the unexplained and the mystery of creative response as an authentic gesture...
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In this impressive gathering of fifty poems, Nebenzahl discovers long-lost relatives that were displaced from World War II and the Holocaust. In this unearthing, Nebenzahl finds himself questioning his past and present to imagine a new future in elegiac dimensions. These expressions intertwine and mediate language as a process for divinity, humor, and truth. The poetry excavates with humanity the trauma of the unexplained and the mystery of creative response as an authentic gesture from the human hand and heart that is writing." KAREN FINLEY

"Look for the rainbow fringes. At such bright speculative mind-trip edges in these poems, one finds polka dots and moonbeams, the summer of hate, dad's whiskey spittle on the lapel of a National Guardsman, poems written on A&P bags, Mingus, ice and madness, Freaky Jerry, red diaperism, fly-or-die panic, and people miraculously wearing love like heaven. The whole book is a dreamarium. In a world of jingles written like lead bullets, Paul Nebenzahl's poems stand generously to oppose them." AL FILREIS, Kelly Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, author of Wallace Stevens & the Actual World.