Go Soon by Deborah Fried-Rubin

Facing the “confusion of days we all live,” Deborah Fried-Rubin searches for meaning in the ancient rituals of Judaism and “the warm press of family.” Using language by turns playful, pensive and experimental, she takes imaginative leaps — from mourning the passing of elders in a Japanese watercolor-of-a-poem to meditations on a future arrived “and its luggage is gone.” Through one startling image after another, she radically transforms the quotidian. Readers will be grateful to enter the “living sanctified dimension” of Go Soon in the company of this very talented poet.
–Maria Terrone, author of A Secret Room in Fall, The Bodies We Were Loaned, and Eye to Eye (forthcoming, 2014)

Deborah Fried-Rubin‘s chapbook, Go Soon, reminds us of the bitter grief yet rich abundance of a life lived in the midst of loss and plenty. “Everything only connected by memory remembering memory,” she wisely writes. Open this book and you have a poet’s memory cabinet: preserving her grandmothers’ face; her husband at her son’s bar mitzvah; a careening bicycle crash from childhood; even an imagined future memory of her sons sifting through her shoes after her death. In “In Crevices, Hanami,” the Japanese motif of the “sensitivity of passing” during the transient beauty of spring’s cherry blossoms seems central to the book’s aesthetic: the “green and painful places” where life and mortality are braided together, as in so many of the poems in this fine collection. These moving poems walk the knife’s edge between arrivals and departures, finding arrivals within departures that welcome you with their “unfastened kiss.”
–Sharon Dolin, author of Whirlwind, Burn and Dodge, Realm of the Possible, Serious Pink, and Heart Work

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]