Grammars of Hope by Chana Kraus-Friedberg ****** Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award *****

“I can barely remember / how we all used to touch each other,” writes Chana Kraus-Friedberg in Grammars of Hope. These poems confront issues of isolation and connection heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, and they confront complications and inequities that preceded the pandemic. Here is a writer reckoning with what it meant to grow up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, and here is a writer addressing independence. Hope and lament are braided in this collection, as they are in life. These poems are real, fueled by longing, honesty, frustration, and celebration. They speak across many chasms, and they guide us over and through what divides us. They remind us that we can “grieve for / a life and a certainty / I’d never want back.” As in the poem “First Step,” Chana Kraus-Friedberg has found a language of hope in this first book “after years of playing God / like a slot machine.” These poems matter. They address what we inherit, but they also address what we can build.

–Cindy Hunter Morgan, Author of Harborless, 2018 Michigan Notable Book and Winner, 2017 Moveen Prize in Poetry

In Grammars of Hope, Chana Kraus-Friedberg poignantly charts an escape from the atomizing and constricting permissions of a Jewish background in Brooklyn toward an alternate New York City, one where Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovitz can love “not quite silently,” where there are new tribes that talk about words, long-haired men and sweaty poets, tribes with “bright, spiky mohawks.” She does not find this new city at first, but Kraus-Friedberg in poem after poem bristles with a lyric intensity and drive that achieves this fuller self, that “perfect sentence” as she says in one poem, “words strung together like small shining orbs.” She is wise enough at book’s end to know why the words are there and hopes that we, in this often polarizing pandemic “wild” world can hear them—and hear them we do—line by line—in this smart and award winning collection.

–Dennis Hinrichsen, Poet Laureate Emeritus of the Greater Lansing Area and author of This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go