Doubleback Books announces the release of Rachel Neve-Midbar’s poetry collection, Salaam of Birds. Rachel Neve-Midbar’s Salaam of Birds was born of conflict and reflects conflict. Poems of witness are important. They fill in the emotional gaps that journalism can’t. This book is important. It was when it was first published, and it’s perhaps even more-so now. Salaam of Birds was first published in April 2020 by Tebot Bach Press, a small independent press in Southern California which has since gone out of business.
Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, writes that Salaam of Birds “is a beautiful, kind book, one filled with longing of last rites, with elegiac tonalities, and yet with fortitude of memory, which sometimes is as touchable as bits of earth that we hide in our pockets, to remember.”
David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour, says “Salaam of Birds is an intimate yet public book of psalms of sorrowing and songs of praise, a testament to individual courage and endurance in the face of daily tragedy. Indeed, Salaam of Birds is a truly remarkable and essential volume of poems.”
Download your copy on the Doubleback website!
Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach, 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014, winner of The Clockwork Prize) and Thought and New Language in the Menstrual Poem (Palgrave MacMillan, upcoming). Rachel is co-editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia, 2023). She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to translate Holocaust poet Abba Kovner. Rachel is also the Poetry Editor at Calul Journal. More at rachelnevemidbar.com.
