About this book
Carine Topal’s compact, powerful Dear Blood is an elegy for relatives lost in the Holocaust, for homes abandoned in fear, for siblings and parents. The different forms—long lines, short lines, poems scattered across the page and poems clustering in prose—seek restlessly to make sense of grief and violence. Topal is trying to express the inexpressible, and in so doing finds beauty in the determination to question and to remember. “Take your stone and sling, love,” she writes, speaking for and with a relative who survived the camps. “Take my head in your hands.”
“Remarkably, Topal’s lyrical poems—so graceful, beautiful, and spare—manage to bear the inordinate weight of Jewish tragedy and loss.”
—Yehoshua November, LA Times Book Prize finalist and author of The Concealment of Endless Light
“This small collection of poems punches way above its weight. In some manner, it provides both discrete and extended elegies. And isn’t it difficult to write a Holocaust poem, now? Topal carries it off, elevates memory enveloped within image for scrutiny, as if to say: here is another angle, here is something you may not have seen before: ‘streets glazed with brine, the reek of a dead wren, and cabbage.’ Some of these poems function almost as still-life paintings – not the lovely fruit, or the rotting fruit, or the fruit with a skull, the ‘memento mori’ – not as reminders of death, but as capsules of what stays and goes – ‘even the bending light/leaves,’ she writes. Topal’s syntax houses a surrealist, but not one who makes no sense for a living – rather, one who finds new and cogent approaches to sense in the sentence. The questions rooted in these poems – ‘what did I know of the menace and flaw’ – the rhetorical gesture reminiscent of Robert Hayden’s, regret tinged with frustration – both invite and indict the reader. These poems offer an homage to how our personal and communal history can be grasped and shaped by language, luxuriant and lingering, expanding the capacity of detail and imagination to capture, render, and hold.”
—Patty Seyburn, author of Threshold Delivery
“With a miniaturist’s eye, Carine Topal employs a cascade of revelatory images that supercharge these truly exquisite poems—poems both beautifully wrought and deeply felt. With superb craftsmanship, the poet orchestrates her language using incandescent gestures and accruing details, as she effectively memorializes her family’s history, as well as the Holocaust’s victims, and the plight of refugees. In some of these compelling poems, the irony of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and on the wrong side of catastrophic events, leads to human tragedies that continue to manifest themselves in those involved, as well as in their descendants. There’s a mythic weight and intensity to Topal’s confrontation of the heart’s darkest chambers. Her voice, touched by biblical allegory, grace, and éclat, evocatively pleads: ‘In the dark rift of the worried world, bring to us the last of the olive trees.’ Bring us peace.”
—Maurya Simon, author of La Sirena: A Novella in Verse