Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 294
- Language: English
- Date Published: November 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-29-2
Praise
In this tour de force, Kaminsky wields his own ax against the iconic “Kafka,” the classic modernist we think we know. Smashing that idol in the book’s multiple collaged texts, poetry and prose, Kaminsky restores the shattered, impossibly cohering fragments of Kafka’s own being. –PHILIP FRIED, author of Interrogating Water and other poems and
editor of The Manhattan Review
For Kafka, writing was an ax to break the frozen sea within. And so it is with Kaminsky’s work, dipping and diving into twists and turns of Kafka’s being, particularly his inner life – our inner life. Through poetry, prose, reflection, speculation and documentation, we are led to awe and appreciation for psycho-spiritual reality. We meet faces that seek us and a wind-swept visage challenges us to evolve further, if we can, if we dare. Kafka’s Ax eggs us on to the far side of our lives, nothing closer or more intimate, whirls of opacity and transparency that tear us with wonder. —MICHAEL EIGEN, author of Under the Totem: In Search of a Path and
Contact with the Depths
In Kafka’s Ax, Marc Kaminsky interweaves prose fiction and poetry with such grace and such remarkable feats of imaginative and sometimes parodic mimicry that one is never entirely sure of the border between genres. This book is for anyone who appreciates the craft of writing and how the language of poetry and prose can come together. —JACK KUGELMASS, author of The Miracle of Intervale Avenue
Excerpt
1. A Dry Eye in the House
After his days
at the office, he set out
for the sea, the one he wrote
about to Oskar Pollak,
whose lips he wanted
to keep always close
to his ear: “What we need
are books that hit us
like a misfortune, a book
must be the ax for the frozen
sea within us.” A stiff
discipline carried him
across the frozen time:
a light snack, reading,
a nap, a walk, dinner
with parents, by ten o’clock
he resumed demolition
of the blinding
horizonless screen of ice
he had to break through
with the written word, yet he
knew the peculiar character
of their Germanjewishczech
existence couldn’t be
rendered as tragedy,
it compelled a cold kind
of writing, pure
as a port-mortem report,
a scrutiny that let no one
escape into catharsis.
Author
Marc Kaminsky is a poet and retired psychotherapist. He is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including The Stones of Lifta (Dos Madres Press), The Road from Hiroshima (Simon & Schuster), and Daily Bread (University of Illinois Press). His poems, essays and fiction have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Manhattan Review, The American Scholar, Natural Bridge, The Oxford Book of Aging, and Voices within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. He has published six books on aging, reminiscence and late-life development, and the culture of Yiddishkeit.
