Amaranth Borsuk’s Handiwork, as Paul Hoover attests in his introduction, “is highly intelligent, well-crafted poetry that also bears deep wisdom, not by bowing to a doctrine of poetics but rather by cutting freshly into family history and cultural tradition.” Continuing themes of absence and presence, Hoover suitably notes, are “beautifully interleaved within the text,” and readers, “in mining this text, will discover more than one kind of gold.” 

Handiwork is in itself a work of craftsmanship, piecing together fragments while at the same time producing anew. Borsuk summons the tradition of Hebrew gematria to investigate and engage with language’s slipperiness, and, as she explains, to provide “a sense of hope within constraint: the fruitful possibility of language.” It also wrestles with and probes into “where family history becomes personal mythology, and where gaps open up that ask to be filled.” The reader explores, in Handiwork, both the creative and destructive urges imminent in expression, as “what wounds is easily unwound.”

Learn more about the author here.