Knoxville, TN—Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of the poetry collection The Hardship Post by Jehanne Dubrow. Dubrow’s poems are brimming with reverence for history and for an ever-reimagined sense of identity. They urge readers along a trek through Poland, where an aching sense of displacement intertwines with nostalgia.
In The Hardship Post, the poems do not stay put, but rather wind a path through cities and perspectives – the mute tourist, the Black Madonna, and a Cinderella who prefers fur slippers. Readers soon find themselves miles away from where they started, in places “where there’s extra pay and risk of war.” The poem’s narrators visit the Izaak and Rehmuh synangogues, visit Auschwitz, blend in amongst drug-addled rave dancers, and revisit fairy tales and folklore. They are constantly grappling with a sense of otherness as readers are uprooted from one scene to the next. Dubrow’s subtle nuances of beauty with sorrow, amber with ash, create an emotional and tactile world that will immerse readers completely, and leave them questioning whirlwinds.
David Mason, says of Dubrow’s collection: “I admire Jehanne Dubrow’s poems not only for the pose and beauty of her lines, but also for the way she grapples with big subjects: inheritance and home, the cultural and the personal. A bearer of tradition, she also knows what it’s like to lose herself in modernity. ‘I do not belong where bodies separate / from minds like sand trying to leave behind / the sea.’ Poems become strands of continuity stretch almost to breaking by mobility. Dubrow seems to have lived everywhere – and that is precisely where The Hardship Post should be read.”
Linda Pastan says, “At the place where the cruelties of history and those of story intersect, Jehanne Dubrow has staked a claim. These are poems of emotional intensity under formal control. An impressive first collection.”
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently Red Army Red and Stateside. She is the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and an assistant professor in literature and creative writing at Washington College, on the Eastern shore of Maryland. The Hardship Post, originally released in 2009, was her first book of poems.
The Hardship Post is available for sale now at www.sundresspublications.com.