“The angel of history’s wings were forced open, Walter Benjamin wrote, by a gust from Paradise. Unable to reorient himself, he flies into the future with his face to the past, devastated by the atrocities that pile up at his feet. In Aunt Bird, Yerra Sugarman comes to us as our own angel of history, the afterimage of the Holocaust indelibly marking her lyric vision. In this book length elegy, Sugarman works at the intersection of historian, mourner, and niece, lovingly revivifying her lost Aunt Feiga on the page, showing the reader how grief can be a life-long project, with its own demands and ethics. The dead may be irrevocably gone, but as Sugarman reminds us, not everyone who dies is lost.”
—Jason Schneiderman
“‘To remember is both plague and song.’ This is one of the myriad striking lines in Yerra Sugarman’s Aunt Bird, a book of holocaust poems like no other. What can we know of this ‘genocidal little earth?’ What must we invent? Sugarman’s intense—even glorious—lyrical poems draw song from a life the poet is compelled to imagine, never having actually met this aunt whose name in Yiddish meant ‘bird.’ ‘Her life was like a thick soup in my mouth,’ the poet confesses. Language in these poems is pummeled and ‘exploded like melons,’ watches as ‘the sky / is pulled back like a bandage from the skin,’ understands that ‘courage is like meat packed in ice . . . it can’t free anything.’ Yet beauty is a kind of freedom, and the surreal beauty of this book is as compelling as its tragedy.”
—Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate
“‘You come alive,’ Yerra Sugarman writes near the start of Aunt Bird, addressing the book’s title character. In this exquisite, transportive collection, Sugarman enacts the longing of so many who lost relatives during the Shoah: to preserve the memory of the murdered, to restore their humanity and individuality, and to erase erasure itself. Sugarman depicts Aunt Bird—or Feiga Maler, as was her given name—as a young woman capable of finding ‘brutal beauty’ even in the Kraków Ghetto, a landscape of high walls and razor wire. ‘To imagine no one completely vanishes,’ Sugarman asserts, ‘is to believe a person is / not rescued or preserved only as a body.’ Through these poems, Aunt Bird is imagined into life again; she is unvanished. And we are fortunate to know her.”
—Jehanne Dubrow