by Judith Baumel

Walt Whitman Award winner Judith Baumel’s latest collection of poems, Thorny, is a fearless and poignant book connecting political displacement with personal and generational loss. Through rumination and subtle intrigue, Baumel invites readers to travel with her from the mystical pathways of Italy to war-torn Europe to the gutters and sidewalk cracks of the Bronx. Baumel’s thoughtful meditations rise above and snarl in the rock and sinew of the world, then pull the reader into a robust embrace. Casually erudite and recklessly passionate, Thorny brings past and present into close conversation, illuminating both.

Judith Baumel’s previous books are The Weight of Numbers, for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Now, The Kangaroo Girl and Passeggiate. She is Professor Emerita of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as President of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, director of The Poetry Society of America and a Fulbright Scholar in Italy.

“Judith Baumel deftly braids the classic and the demotic, family heritage and happenstance, both in reference and in idiom. Her way of probing her settings and subjects calls on the striking idiosyncrasies of naming and points us toward origins. The language is always engaged. Strong, sometimes dark, moods pass through these pages, but there are also beakers full of the warm south.” — Sven Birkerts

“Judith Baumel’s latest collection, Thorny, is a book filled with leisurely, sensorial strolls—passeggiate— through European and American landscapes, through the ruined geographies of the Shoah, and through the more private terrains of family history. These poems ‘bring distant ghosts / forward to the spilled circle.’ In ‘Pale Stars,’ a speaker describes drinking whiskey from glasses that once held the wax of Yarzheit candles, an experience that stirs memory with grief but also a dash of subversive pleasure. And this is the book’s power, how even as it elegizes ‘those who are gone,’ Thorny takes in the sights and scents and flavors of the right-now, past and present mixing provocatively together, the future walking somewhere on the street ahead of us.” – Jehanne Dubrow

“Here is a book by a poet unafraid to mine the ‘brutal business’ of death and the ‘generous rot’ of life. In Thorny, Judith Baumel lets herself roam and ruminate through the book’s many subjects—loss, history, memory. Though common domain in poetry, Baumel has an uncommonly keen attention to the world and to the world of language. Multi-directional, polyvocal, erudite, daring, and sly—these poems are the yield of a life both well-observed and deeply felt. The book begins with an urgent declaration: ‘I want to look this way and be looked at this way.’” – Jan-Henry Grey