Dividing Rivers by Ivy Schweitzer

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