Language of the Lost and Found by Deborah Fried-Rubin

At Jerusalem’s wailing wall, in a car driving through Queens, at the family table, “in the town you do not know,” the poems in Language of the Lost and Found revel in the spaces between visible and invisible worlds. Deborah Fried-Rubin’s wonderful poems delight in found language, mistranslations and fractured lyric forms. They are experimental in the very best sense: the poet’s deep pleasure in linguistic play informs her exploration of compelling questions about identity, family and home.

–Nicole Cooley, author of Breach, Milk Dress and Resurrection

 
In Language of the Lost and Found, Deborah Fried-Rubin poignantly observes that “not all loss is bad,” yet almost nothing is lost on the generous spirit of this exceptionally gifted poet. Intelligent, agile, and masterfully-crafted, the poems in this dynamic and splendidly-written collection, chock-full of life, ambitiously retrieve and illuminate what appear to be peripheral moments from the interstices of daily experience. With a consciousness that is fluent in both the ancient and thoroughly contemporary worlds, Fried-Rubin pays homage to the seemingly commonplace, which she memorably elevates, elegantly and idiosyncratically, to the remarkable.

–Yerra Sugarman, author of The Bag of Broken Glass and Forms of Gone

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]