Description
Our Dark and Radiant Land
by Helena Lipstadt
$20.99, Full-length, paper
979-8-88838-263-9
2023
AFTER THE HOLOCAUST, Helena Lipstadt’s survivor parents fled Poland vowing never to return. Decades later, after her parents’ deaths, she warily visits, then returns, again and again. Walking on the city streets where her parents played as children, Helena begins to comprehend the interwoven culture of Jews and Poles. She honors her family’s layered history as she seeks and builds connections with the Polish people she meets.
In powerful prose and poems, Lipstadt looks at a bloodstained past with her heart’s eyes. Our Dark and Radiant Land is a map to a new place of seeing, where truth and reconciliation coexist.
Helena Lipstadt is the author of two chapbooks, Leave Me Signs and If My Heart Were a Desert. Her poems have been featured in The Midwest Quarterly, Sinister Wisdom, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. Anthologies that hold her prose work include The Challenge of Shalom, From Memory to Transformation and A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crises.
Her work has been generously supported by residencies at WUJS Arts Project, Arad, Israel and The Borderland Foundation, Sejny, Poland.
She studied with poets Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, Irena Klepfisz and Laurel Ann Bogen.
Lipstadt once accepted Bedouin hospitality in a tent on the shoulder of Mount Sinai, travelled up the Nile River in a felluca, and in Poland, helped re-create a 17th century wooden synagogue. She designed and handbuilt her home in Maine.
Lipstadt was born in Berlin and now lives in Los Angeles and Blue Hill, Maine.
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