Intimate and vividly detailed, Night Breaks in the Garret looks steadily at wounds familiar to many gay men: disappointed father, alienation from one’s religious community, a cold initiation into sexuality, and the impact of AIDS. But it drives toward healing—through joy in language and side-by-side English and Yiddish versions which marry the poet’s Jewish heritage and his identity as a gay man, and especially through its generous discoveries of radiance in the everyday. “Yes even if only this once,” Taub beckons us, “be luminous.”
—Benjamin S. Grossberg, author of My Husband Would, winner of the 2021 Connecticut Book Award
True to this volume’s “poems and peregrinations” subtitle, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub invites us to accompany him on a lyrical journey of transitions, transformations, and translations. His alliterative language evokes melody and sonic power, mastering sounds and vocabulary like a puppeteer, bending words to his will, making them perform and dance at his command. The selected, soulful Yiddish translations embody the essence of Yiddishkeit. Gut geton, well done.
–Barbara Krasner, author of Ethel’s Song: Ethel Rosenberg’s Life in Poems and The Night Watch: An Ekphrastic Poetry Collection
While there’s memory and as there are dreams. Yes. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub‘s collection, Night Breaks in the Garrett: Poems and Peregrinations, claims all those windows of visit and every opening of guess. Through a deftness borne of longing and in his embrace of perhaps, Taub fathoms the most wondrous of places — the why of ourselves.
—Hiram Larew, Poet
Night Breaks in the Garret is an expansive yet intimate collection. Through an interplay of poetry and prose, the book spins its narrative arc. Taub’s storytelling feels at times Midrashic, as he weaves together childhood experience, a gay Jewish man’s coming-of-age during the AIDS epidemic, and an older speaker’s reflection’s on faith, parental figures & absences, and love in the context of a present marked by piercing knowledge of the precarity of our existence. And yet the poems are not without hope. Like prayer, this radiant collection entreats us to ‘come/if not to embrace or celebrate/then to inhabit our shortcomings.’
–Shara McCallum, author of Behold
Taub’s poems are luminous and beautifully Jewish, glinting with tenderness, vulnerability, longing beyond endurance. They choked off my breath, made the roots of my hair tingle, left me frozen with my knuckles pressed hard against my mouth. With each startlingly vivid turn of phrase, Night Breaks In The Garret reveals the staggering price too often exacted for being precisely who we are, while also reminding us of the spiritual imperative to pay it again and again. Searing and indelible.
–Elissa Wald, Editor-in-Chief of JUDITH Magazine
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