{"product_id":"dear-memphis","title":"Dear Memphis","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"What do I know of exile?\" asks the speaker in \u003cem\u003eDEAR MEMPHIS\u003c\/em\u003e, standing inside the colliding geographies and intimate economies of the American South. Offering a direct address to the city where the poet grew up, this collection explores the displacement and belonging of a Jewish family in Memphis, Tennessee, alongside their histories of community and environment. The simultaneous richness and spareness of Edelman's poems sing with their attention to the particular body and what it cannot carry, what it cannot put down. Through letters, visual art, city documents, and dialogue, Dear Memphis excavates ancestry, inheritance, and the ecological possibility of imagining a future.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRachel Edelman\u003c\/strong\u003e is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee who writes into diasporic living. Her poems have appeared in \u003cem\u003eNarrative, The Seventh Wave, The Threepenny Review, West Branch,\u003c\/em\u003e and many other journals. They have received material support from the City of Seattle's Office of Arts \u0026amp; Culture, the Academy of American Poets, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House and finalist commendations from the Adrienne Rich Award, the Pink Poetry Prize, and the National Poetry Series. Edelman earned a BA in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic, and pedagogical practice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Braided within and across the primary subjects of Rachel Edelman's powerful \u003cem\u003eDear Memphis\u003c\/em\u003e—diaspora, racial and social injustice, family, place—is an ongoing medtation on the complexities of memory. On the paradox of memory, which like a road map of a city one no longer lives in, holds absence and presence simultaneously. There, in the re-envisioned past, are the legends and landmarks and intersections of time. Here, through lyrics enriched by Edelman's vivid imagery and distinctive music, is timelessness. 'Beneath what I see is what I know,' she writes. \u003cem\u003eDear Memphis\u003c\/em\u003e is testament to the vastness of that knowledge.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eLinda Bierds\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Rachel Edelman's \u003cem\u003eDear Memphis \u003c\/em\u003eis a kind of modern-day Exodus, offering haunting lyric poems that evoke experiences of dispersal and diaspora. A white Jewish woman with deep roots in Memphis, Edelman speaks searingly of 'what she knows of the South' and its racial history, one in which she is uneasily embedded. Whether arriving out of personal, biblical, historical, or political stories of migration, Edelman's poem are piercingly self-aware. This is a work of moving lamentation, undergirded by the poet's sustained interest in exposing and trying to hold opposing truths: 'the country where I am \/ is the country I abandoned.'\" -\u003cstrong\u003e Shara McCallum\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"In \u003cem\u003eDear Memphis\u003c\/em\u003e, Rachel Edelman probes the shifting meaning of the intersection of whiteness and Jewishness in the US South. Refusing the romance of suffering, these poems enter the terrain of ongoing struggle that is history and insist that there is nothing inherently liberatory about having been oppressed. Where white Jewish accumulation takes place alongside entrenched anti-Blackness, what might the intergenerational trauma of antisemitism mean for the possibilities of solidarity?Punctuated with epistolary poems, Edelman's searching text recalls that to address is to traverse a distance and seek a closeness, that reckoning is a profound intimacy, that to leave is also the condition of return. 'Who did I choose \/ when I wished myself elsewhere?' Edelman asks. Holding to the possibility of transformation in encounter, \u003cem\u003eDear Memphis \u003c\/em\u003eshimmers with the difficult work of love.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eClaire Schwartz\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c!----\u003e","brand":"Itasca Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54526371037459,"sku":"9798988137825","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0948\/3521\/2563\/files\/unnamed.jpg?v=1785851935","url":"https:\/\/danuc.net\/products\/dear-memphis","provider":"Danu's Wardrobe","version":"1.0","type":"link"}