Pillow-Stones by Renée Ruderman

With lush and intricate imagery, Renée Ruderman captures Jewish and Jewish-American intergenerational experiences and memories in Pillow-Stones. The poems in this chapbook act as vignettes, offering intimate examinations of mourning loss and healing from tragedy as well as embracing truth and finding the sacredness that exists in all things living. It’s beautiful. It’s powerful.

–Julia Nguyen, Former Editor of Metrosphere, the creative writing publication of Metropolitan State University of Denver and 2022 Honored Graduate of Metropolitan State University of Denver

Renée Ruderman’s collection Pillow-Stones is characterized by rich imagery that evokes real and imagined memories of the past. A plethora of impressionist glimpses allows for the lyrical I’s emotions to unfold and provides a strong sense of moment and place. Ruderman’s poem “Mikveh” offers a unique combination of the Jewish woman’s sense of obligation to perform the traditional ritual bath with a positive affirmation of female sensuality while simultaneously commemorating a space of medieval Jewish history.

–Dr. Claudia Görg, Professor in American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Mainz, Germany

Renée Ruderman’s poetry is both painterly and musical, intimately in touch with the world at hand. As when she presents an abecedarian poem about the Carnival Fountain in Mainz, Germany:

“Niches and mouths dribble, spray water

On each other, and masks, breasts, twisted in the

Pandemonium and hullabaloo,

Quipping, quaffing in the brouhaha….”

Her canny interweaving of sight and sound, emotion and intellect, make each poem here an invocation of what Blake called “sweet delight”—something we are all need more of these days.

–Joe Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado 2014-2019 and author of 19 poetry collections