It’s often said that truth is the final destination of the human spirit. Such is the vision that attends Deborah Kahan Kolb’s powerfully sentient book, Escape of Light. She is a truth-teller, granting us the grace of permission to be birthed into a world of both the hope and the wrath of humanity— to air the soil of anguish, shame, and rage, while salvaging what is pardonable. Spawned from the opening poem Emerging, Art of, there is an arresting voice of acceptance, a “leave-taking” from the binding coils of memory’s inheritance of tragedy. Whether of a son’s burial, a Great Grandfather’s sufferance at Auschwitz, or of Charlottesville’s weeping bloody soil, a self-enlightened healing graces her poems to protect us from disappearing into the amnesia of history, the unthinkable allowing of things. She chooses, instead, to embrace the steady march of metamorphosis, through the personal and the political, to emerge from the impotence of silence to restore the music of memory through poetry and song. Her poems examine what is humane in us, the trapped light that escapes, to affirm Stephen Hawking’s credo, “things can get out of a black hole.” Escape of Light is evocatively alive in its testament to truth as core to the survival of the human spirit.
–James Ragan, Author of The Hunger Wall and Too Long a Solitude
Deborah Kahan Kolb’s Escape of Light is about the establishment of self, about becoming. Kolb explores what it means to pass from one existence into another, and she does this with startling and precise imagery. We are reminded of the responsibilities of personhood as we shepherd daughters forward into adulthood and what happens when we fail them in the most profound ways. Moreover, Kolb likes to remind us of the ways that history prefigures the present, whether that history is personal or political. Again, it’s that movement toward becoming, which—as she demonstrates with her prescient vision—is a complicated and unfinishable process.
–Sonia Greenfield, author of Letdown
Deborah Kahan Kolb offers a poetry of the body, of birth and birthing, of a girl becoming a woman but also of an elderly Holocaust survivor finally beginning his life by removing the concentration camp tattoo from his forearm. Escape of Light twines together the intimately private and the searingly public in carefully crafted and formally inventive poems that are not easily forgotten.
–John Biguenet, author of The Torturer’s Apprentice and Oyster
Deborah Kahan Kolb’s Escape of Light proves that we are the light that is birthed into the darkness of history. Steeped in Jewish history, each poem is a burst, is a detailing of “the burden of birth,” whether that birth be: the removal of a compulsory tattoo, becoming a matriarch, entering the afterlife, entering a new age, or crystallizing into a writer. In this collection, Kolb is our “butterfly laureate,” our “Hallelujah,” our brave “woman in the ring.” I can’t wait to see what she writes next!
–Jennifer Jean, author of The Fool
Phoenix from the ashes, butterfly from the chrysalis, and, too, the Holocaust survivor growing free from his tattoo—all are represented here and compose the thrilling brightness and heft of Kolb’s full-on rebirth through these determined and accomplished poems. At times caustic, at times meditative, both self-critical and authoritatively self-affirming, both personal and political, this collection invites us into the very act of creation complete with its slammed doors and ecstatic song. It’s a run-out-in-the-street kind of book—run out, choose life, “Go ungently,” as Kolb’s poems help us do.
–Jessica Greenbaum
Sonia Greenfield –
Deborah Kahan Kolb’s Escape of Light is about the establishment of self, about becoming. Kolb explores what it means to pass from one existence into another, and she does this with startling and precise imagery. We are reminded of the responsibilities of personhood as we shepherd daughters forward into adulthood and what happens when we fail them in the most profound ways. Moreover, Kolb likes to remind us of the ways that history prefigures the present, whether that history is personal or political. Again, it’s that movement toward becoming, which—as she demonstrates with her prescient vision—is a complicated and unfinishable process.
–Sonia Greenfield, author of Letdown
John Biguenet –
Deborah Kahan Kolb offers a poetry of the body, of birth and birthing, of a girl becoming a woman but also of an elderly Holocaust survivor finally beginning his life by removing the concentration camp tattoo from his forearm. Escape of Light twines together the intimately private and the searingly public in carefully crafted and formally inventive poems that are not easily forgotten.
–John Biguenet, author of The Torturer’s Apprentice and Oyster
Jennifer Jean –
Deborah Kahan Kolb’s Escape of Light proves that we are the light that is birthed into the darkness of history. Steeped in Jewish history, each poem is a burst, is a detailing of “the burden of birth,” whether that birth be: the removal of a compulsory tattoo, becoming a matriarch, entering the afterlife, entering a new age, or crystallizing into a writer. In this collection, Kolb is our “butterfly laureate,” our “Hallelujah,” our brave “woman in the ring.” I can’t wait to see what she writes next!
–Jennifer Jean, author of The Fool
Jessica Greenbaum –
Phoenix from the ashes, butterfly from the chrysalis, and, too, the Holocaust survivor growing free from his tattoo—all are represented here and compose the thrilling brightness and heft of Kolb’s full-on rebirth through these determined and accomplished poems. At times caustic, at times meditative, both self-critical and authoritatively self-affirming, both personal and political, this collection invites us into the very act of creation complete with its slammed doors and ecstatic song. It’s a run-out-in-the-street kind of book—run out, choose life, “Go ungently,” as Kolb’s poems help us do.
–Jessica Greenbaum
James Ragan –
It’s often said that truth is the final destination of the human spirit. Such is the vision that attends Deborah Kahan Kolb’s powerfully sentient book, Escape of Light. She is a truth-teller, granting us the grace of permission to be birthed into a world of both the hope and the wrath of humanity— to air the soil of anguish, shame, and rage, while salvaging what is pardonable. Spawned from the opening poem Emerging, Art of, there is an arresting voice of acceptance, a “leave-taking” from the binding coils of memory’s inheritance of tragedy. Whether of a son’s burial, a Great Grandfather’s sufferance at Auschwitz, or of Charlottesville’s weeping bloody soil, a self-enlightened healing graces her poems to protect us from disappearing into the amnesia of history, the unthinkable allowing of things. She chooses, instead, to embrace the steady march of metamorphosis, through the personal and the political, to emerge from the impotence of silence to restore the music of memory through poetry and song. Her poems examine what is humane in us, the trapped light that escapes, to affirm Stephen Hawking’s credo, “things can get out of a black hole.” Escape of Light is evocatively alive in its testament to truth as core to the survival of the human spirit.
–James Ragan, Author of The Hunger Wall and Too Long a Solitude