Born in Brooklyn, NY, Ivy Schweitzer has lived for many years in Vermont and taught English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. Her poetry has appeared, most recently, in Passager, Ritualwell, Tikkun, New Croton Review, Mississippi Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Mid-Atlantic Review and The New England Poetry Club’s Prize Winners’ Anthology 2024. Dividing Rivers is her debut solo collection. For her collaborative work, visit her author page at https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ivyschweitzer/.
PRAISE:
These poems are a provocative wonderment around whiteness, Jewish identity, feminism, class and other questions so essential to our times. Full of difficult events and able to accept discomfort, these poems create both an engaging conversation and a cry of frustration at racial oppression that no reader can fully address. These are powerful poems in a tongue that has learned to hold itself at times but that won’t be bitten back.
–Heidi Erdrich, Poet Laureate of Minneapolis
Dividing Rivers is a marvelous collection, tackling Jewishness, whiteness, and feminism in ways that are unique to the poet, and which also guide the reader toward a closer inspection of our own lives. Ivy Schweitzer doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff and, in fact, heads over and over again in the direction of difficulty; the result is a collection that is both heart-wrenching and eye-opening, with lines and rhythms so poetic and lovely that we are eased into the truths they uncover. This book will be a companion and a solace to anyone reckoning with their own place in the world and its often tragic timeline.
–Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik (2022)
In this searing poetic treatise on the history of the antisemitism, racism, and inhumanity that squirms in the “suburbs of the lizard brain” of America, Ivy Schweitzer, a Jewish, activist poet, lets no one off the hook, least of all herself, as she digs deep into her own complicit narrative and asks how we can be allies to those who reject us; how “not to do to others what was done to us.” With generosity, tenderness and a conversational fluency that belies her poems’ deep attention to music and craft, Dividing Rivers takes us on an emotional, beautiful, and necessary journey that proves the power of poetry to confront and enlighten us all in difficult times.
–Richard Michelson, author of Sleeping As Fast as I Can
Corey Elizabeth Jackson –
Review for Dividing Rivers by Ivy Schweitzer:
An enigmatic theme in the book of poetry Dividing Rivers is the common crushing divide among different human races. In the resonant poem Death in Stratford, an actress who plays Desdemona describes both Othello and Desdemona as “victims of white patriarchy.” Yet the speaker is vehemently opposed to an outcome “where loving to death is the only resistance.” With searing imagery, Schweitzer’s poetry describes multi-racial scenarios in which her speaker’s own youthful worldview conflicts radically with that of her elders. Her enlightenment involves braving the storms of clashing cultures. These vicissitudes help her emerge strengthened. This theme is exquisitely portrayed in the poem Self-Portrait with Kintsugi. It depicts “a shapely porcelain bowl holding precisely nothing.” The bowl shatters, but is reassembled with “an earthy gold to fill the cracks.” This is a robust metaphor for Schweitzer’s speaker, whose shattering experiences make her newly whole and stronger, and fiercely loyal to crossing society’s dividing rivers of racial conflict. Schweitzer’s vibrant book of poems simmers with empathic energy and poignant self-reflection.