Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 48
- Language: English
- Published: Janurary 2013
- ISBN: 978-1-933675-91-6
Praise
Ruth Handel’s Tugboat Warrior poems are the lyrical equivalent of time travel. To enter into their extended, loving, detailed re-creation of not just the historical circumstances but—far more important because of its uniqueness—the inner life of a tense, energetic, magnificent American era and some of the people that era expressed itself through is to seize, finally, that time for ourselves. A wonderful book by a wonderful poet. —Vijay Seshadri
Excerpt
An Origin Tale
About my mother, Florence,
this was the story told.
One day your grandmother
hit your mother
and broke her nose, and your mother
(here my father chuckles)
ran away to sea.
Took the streetcar
to the Brooklyn Navy Yard,
and enlisted in the Navy.
The sea was New York Harbor, the year 1918.
The reason for the fight was never told.
Author
Ruth D. Handel is a poet, writer and teacher. She has published a chapbook, Reading The White Spaces (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and poems in a variety of journals including Common Ground Review, Westchester Review, en(compass), The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Let The Poets Speak, Controlled Burn, Clockwise Cat, Contemporary Hiabun Online and Evening Street Review. She teaches poetry courses and workshops in poetry writing, gives poetry performances, and manages the Poetry Caravan, a volunteer organization of 30 poets who bring poetry to the community.
In her professional career, she was a developer of the field of family literacy; her academic publications include Building Family Literacy in an Urban Community (Teachers College Press, 1999). She is professor emerita, Montclair State University, where she taught literature and literacy and integrated poetry into the teacher education curriculum.
