The Birthday of the Dead
The Birthday of the Dead
The Birthday of the Dead
By Rachel Abramowitz
March 31, 2022 • 6 x 9 • x 68 pages • 978-1-7336020-7-5
In lyrics “smooth as doves,” Rachel Abramowitz sings of our fallen world, its forgotten seedpods and smoldering fires, and the terrible, steaming coats of ancient wolves, unearthed from glacier-melt. These haunting poems witness the kinetic ever-presence of the dead: “their tentacles curl and wave, tighten and drop” until “[t]here is nothing to be done.” Still, Abramowitz’s keen poetic intelligence finds wonder in the luminosity of the moon, in dew drops and foxgloves, and in the “rich scraps” of wisdom salvaged, as if by magic, from grief’s edge. The Birthday of the Dead is a work of astonishment and pure energy.
—Kiki Petrosino
Rachel Abramowitz
Rachel Abramowitz is the author of the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York.