Twenty Ways of Looking by Miriam Weinstein

“Only connect!” is the famous directive of E.M. Forrester. The twenty poems in Miriam Weinstein‘s debut collection connect deeply to the natural world, her childhood and Jewish heritage, and the needs of others—homeless people for help. With her background as a photographer, Weinstein can naturally bring things into sharp focus. She writes about “the fanned formation of geese” and “that winding road behind us under constant reconstruction.” This reader is happy to find a poet with such a keen eye and a voice that’s direct, open, and urgent.
–Margaret Hasse, author of Earth’s Appetite and other poetry collections.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

The poems in Twenty Ways of Looking celebrate home while acknowledging the historical fragility of the places we have called by that name. Each of Miriam Weinstein‘s meditations is shaped by a pervasive sense of the precariousness, and so the preciousness, of civilized life. Hers are poems of experience which could never have been written in youth. Yet in their maturity, they are also playful in that serious way of art that plays for keeps, for the highest stakes: the continuing ability to love one’s life in the unstable, imperfect world.
–Thomas R. Smith, author of The Foot of the Rainbow and The Glory.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

The twenty poem’s in Miriam Weinstein‘s chapbook are both the maps to and the evidence of a struggle to find words the the poet can “learn to trust” as she navigates the difficult terrain of memory and desire, of social and family history. Even the more political poems here—about homelessness, the fear of atomic war, the legacy of the Holocaust—float a belief in the natural world as a place of solace and meaning. These poems enact their own philosophy as “brief moments” of connection: they reach out aand touch us “across the abyss.”
–Jude Nutter, author of I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman and The Curator of Silence.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]