My Father’s Drawer by Jennie Mintz

A book built on memories, Mintz’s ability to excavate the “tokens [left] in her father’s drawer” serve to illuminate a history rife with things unsaid and images misunderstood.  Through deft imagery and poignant sound, Mintz builds a world across the waves, while still present, home. These “photographs [of] Childhood” not only convey what has happened, but how what transpired has inspired voice and understanding.  Family is complex and strange, yet, family is what defines past and sets us towards future.  Those who we recall, are always viewed through our own feelings surrounding them.  A poignant, beautiful book of remembrance, My Father’s Drawer is full of unsuspecting trinkets of memory, love, family waiting to be grappled with over and over.

–Aaron Berkowitz, Editor-in-Chief, Jewish Literary Journal

There is no more universal a language than the poetry of grief and reparation. Through a tapestry of memories and essential self-inquiry, Jennie Mintz’s poetry leads the reader through the painful experiences of her own battles with illness and the aggrieved loss of her father as she mines through family history. Highly imagistic, smartly conceived, these poems resonate with labor of unburying the buried, and turn her transformative gaze outward to the world. Ultimately it is the ferocity of her imaginings that compel the reader forward; her voice remitting from a loss that readers can easily identify with. My Father’s Drawer is simply the best chapbook I have read in years.

–Judith Harris, Author of Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing