{"product_id":"the-polish-dream-machine-mudfish-individual-poet-series-21","title":"The Polish Dream Machine: Mudfish Individual Poet Series #21","description":"\u003cp\u003e“I had to go to the hospital to give birth,” the poet states. When the book emerges, it is\u003cbr\u003ewild. \u003cem\u003eThe Polish Dream Machine\u003c\/em\u003e is marked by the incredible candor Richard Fein is\u003cbr\u003efamous for. He tells us his life, what others bore, and with eloquence and wit defeats the loneliness of old age.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese are exquisite poems about old age. In “My Doras,” he conflates Dora Diamond\u003cbr\u003efrom Freshman English at Brooklyn College with Kafka’s last girlfriend, Dora Dymant,\u003cbr\u003eand he goes to her medical appointments with her and she goes to his, and he tells how they had slipped away, when they were both counsellors at camp in the Poconos, “to the forest, or that nearby town, to make love”, until the final stanza, where he visits the cemetery in Prague with Helen, his wife: “where you had thrown yourself on the grave when Kafka was buried,\/and now you tell me what it was like to be with him\/even as we are married now, we two old people\/ who read together and fondle each other’s body at night—\/the flabs, and creases, and moles, and little growths.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe loses a classmate, Irving Levine, who disappeared (“not by moving away but just by\u003cbr\u003enot being at all”) and stuck with him all his life. “And I am now not far from ending up\u003cbr\u003ewhere Irving did. . . .Irving. . .\/Irving—my street address here in Cambridge,”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRichard Fein is 95. His poems in \u003cem\u003eThe Polish Dream Machine\u003c\/em\u003e bring beauty to the terrors\u003cbr\u003eof old age.” They are quintessential meditations on identity, love lost, and time gone\u003cbr\u003eby—all related with the withering wisdom of old age. They are as candid and revealing\u003cbr\u003eas the old French salesman’s screech, from which, Fein tells us, “this is how the Jew in\u003cbr\u003eme emerged.”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Itasca Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":54526395351315,"sku":"9781893654372","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0948\/3521\/2563\/files\/9781893654372ita_18ca823e-c13d-4795-a7bc-797a7c2d8d31.jpg?v=1785852675","url":"https:\/\/danuc.net\/products\/the-polish-dream-machine-mudfish-individual-poet-series-21","provider":"Danu's Wardrobe","version":"1.0","type":"link"}