$14.99
Steve Pollack’s strength is knowing his audience and being unafraid to veer close to what might be viewed by some as sentimentality. This is the risk and the strength of poems in his debut chapbook,“From Generation to Generation – L’dor Vador “. Pollack’s fierce loyalty to his ancestors, family, religion, and culture allows him deep access to these worlds and offer his readers precise details and portraits that might be otherwise lost. These poems unabashedly dig for roots; his strongest poems, like 1521 Dickinson Street, and What Would You Write? contain sound, language, and imagery that help to drive narratives. “Before voices became digits on hand-held screens—before true and false/ argued as if they both know everything” (from 1521 Dickinson Street), and “Truth, not cold facts or eulogy. Score matches/in short whites on grass courts, when season and elbow allow.” (from What Would You Write?) are examples of Pollack at his best.
–Amy Small-McKinney, Winner of the 2016 Kithara Prize for Walking Toward Cranes (Glass Lyre Press)
Steve Pollack has done something beautiful here. His poetry collection captures the relationship between the individual and the larger group without erasing the existence of the former. Emotional without being maudlin, and conscious of the broader works that surround and condition our experience, Pollack writes with beauty and skill of the dialectic between individual and communal in the story of Jewish existence.
–Rabbi Eric Woodward, Congregation Tiferet Bet Israel, Blue Bell, PA
Interview posted on Barbara Krasner’s blog.
From Generation to Generation L’dor Vador לדור ודור
by Steve Pollack
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-230-6
2020
Steve Pollack hit half-balls with broomsticks, rode the Frankford El, sailed across the equator on the USS Enterprise, across the Mississippi with his wife, two kittens and a mustache. He advised governments, directed an affordable housing co-op, built hospitals, science labs and public schools. Poetry found him later.
steve pollack –
Steve Pollack’s debut collection of narrative poems explores family and faith, people and places he loves. He finds our shared humanity in small and important details. What we learn and what we must pass forward.
Chris Bursk (verified owner) –
My copy of From Generation to Generation just arrived from Finishing Line; from its very first line, “Of four grandparents, three hugged me”, to its final lines, “time is not on your side or mine/ no, it’s not, no it’s not”, its elegiac meditation on memory and time is a pleasure to read.
At the end of “Guessing Game,” the poet says “let me also sing…” and he does
throughout the book!!!!!!!!!