"If only I could see time
as timeless, like
God
or the birds—here"
ABOUT
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Poet, translator, essayist and Fulbright scholar, Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. Rachel is currently in Israel as a 2023-2025 Fulbright postdoc translating the poetry of Abba Kovner. She is also the editor of the anthology Stained: creative writing about menstruation (Querencia Press 2023)and her scholarly work Thought and New Language in the Menstrual Poem is due out from Palgrave MacMillan in 2025. Rachel’s work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies.
PUBLISHED WORKS
POETRY
TRANSLATIONS
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ACCLAIM
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Writing as an Act of the Soul; an Interview with Rachel Neve-Midbar
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Tell Tell Poetry’s Adina Kopinsky talks with Rachel Neve-Midbar about her new collection Salaam of Birds, a book that weaves themes of war, love, motherhood, loss and hope with a connection to the past, Jewish history, how soil can birth a people, and the pathos of life in Israel and Palestine. They talk about Rachel’s poetic process, how poems gestate, birth, and mature, and the trajectory of art.
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“Holding”, Rachel Heimowitz says, “is a woman’s purpose”, and by “holding” she means keeping, securing, preserving, remembering, carrying deep inside as in prayer, witnessing, and testifying truthfully, earnestly and urgently. It is a woman’s purpose, this is true, and it is the poet’s purpose, too. Sometimes it is a splendid accident when a gifted poet is thrown into places and times that demand the poet’s heart and eye. In What the Light Reveals, Heimowitz shows herself to be precisely that poet, and the result is poetry of grace, exquisite wrenching, and stark honesty.
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Perhaps the salaaming birds in the title are meant as a metaphor for the poems in this collection, and they’re making salaams to invite people to read and enjoy the book.
Or perhaps, like William Carlos William’s infamous “red wheelbarrow,” a “salaam of birds” is a phrase the poet chose for imagery and musicality, not intending the phrase to be used as a symbol at all.
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EMMA RICHARDS,
TO TELL POETRY
LIAM THOMPSON, LITERARY REVIEW
KWAME DAWES, LITERARY REVIEW
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