Chicken Fat by Barbara Krasner

Barbara Krasner’s collection of poems, Chicken Fat, is rich and soulful, redemptive, and full of the soothing spice that makes poetry come alive. She writes about heritage, family, the Jewish experience and identity in a way that is fresh and robust. Her poetry is warm, accessible, and utterly singular in its ability to put you right into the middle of the simmer and let you feel all the spice and ‘fat’ of the human experience. There is a love in these poems that is tangible. She has mastered the art of the ‘living language’—an ability to take very personal moments, the small intimate details of a life, and make them speak to a universal scaffold of truths that anyone can acknowledge. This book is called Chicken Fat but there is nothing excessive here, just the rich and full flavor of poetic voice that is beautifully rendered.

–Matthew Lippman, author of Salami Jew and The New Year of Yellow

In Chicken Fat, Barbara Krasner displays a gift for linking moving memories of her New Jersey Jewish childhood and life with the collective memories of her parents’ and grandparents’ history of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe. Krasner’s narrative poems contain both directness and tenderness as she details family and personal loss as well as a tenacious endurance.  She demonstrates a rare gift of describing current and traditional Jewish food (kishka, gribenes, lungen stew) in a way that is not only tantalizes but also provides an ethnic background of this endangered cuisine.  Krasner’s Chicken Fat is a powerful book of poems that transcends her personal story and connects to her readers with a compelling immediacy.

–Laura Boss, author of The Best Lover ( New York Quarterly, 2017) and Editor, Lips