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    Frayed Light
    Frayed Light
    Frayed Light
    Ebook88 pages35 minutes

    Frayed Light

    By Yonatan Berg

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    About this ebook

    This poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yonatan Berg is a poet from Israel and the youngest person ever awarded the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize. This collection brings together the best poems from his three published collections in Hebrew, deftly translated by Joanna Chen. His poetry recounts his upbringing on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and service in a combat unit of the Israeli military, which left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He grapples with questions of religion and tradition, nationalism, war, and familial relationships. The book also explores his conceptual relationship with Biblical, historical, and literary characters from the history of civilization, set against a backdrop of the Mediterranean landscape. Berg shares an insider's perspective on life in Israel today.

    [Sample Text]

    Unity

    We travel the silk road of evening,
    tobacco and desire flickering
    between our hands. We are warm travelers,
    our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms,
    in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee.
    We break bread under the pistachio tree,
    under the Banyan tree, under the dark
    of the Samaritan fig tree. Songs of offering rise up
    in our throats, wandering along the wall of night. We travel
    in the openness of warm eternity. Heavenly voices
    announce a coupling as the quiet horse gallops
    heavenward. We travel with the rest of the world,
    with its atrocities, its piles of ruins, scars of barbed wire,
    traveling with ardor in our loins, with the cry of birth.
    We sit crossed-legged within the rocking
    of flesh, the quiet of the Brahmin, the bells
    of Mass, the tumult of Torah. We travel
    through eagles of death, dilution of earth in rivers,
    in eulogies, through marble, we travel through the silk
    of evening, our hearts like bonfires in the dark.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9780819579140
    Frayed Light
    Author

    Yonatan Berg

    Yonatan Berg is a leading Hebrew poet. He is the youngest recipient of the Yehuda Amichai Prize and a number of other national awards. He has published three books of poetry, one memoir and two novels. His latest book Frayed Light was published in 2019. His novel Far from the Linden Trees was published in 2018 and received excellent reviews. Yonatan Berg is a bibliotherapist and teaches creative writing in Jerusalem.

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      Book preview

      Frayed Light - Yonatan Berg

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