Aunt Bird

By Yerra Sugarman

Aunt Bird is an astonishing, hybrid poetry of witness that observes and testifies to social, political, and historical realities through the recovery of one life silenced by the past. Within these pages, poet Yerra Sugarman confronts the Holocaust as it was experienced by a young Jewish woman: the author’s twenty-three-year-old aunt, Feiga Maler, whom Sugarman never knew, and who died in the Kraków Ghetto in German-occupied Poland in 1942. In lyric poems, prose poems, and lyric essays, Aunt Bird combines documentary poetics with surrealism: sourcing from the testimonials of her kin who survived, as well as official Nazi documents about Feiga Maler, these poems imagine Sugarman’s relationship with her deceased aunt and thus recreate her life. Braiding speculation, primary sources, and the cultural knowledge-base of postmemory, Aunt Bird seeks what Eavan Boland calls “a habitable grief,” elegizing the particular loss of one woman while honoring who Feiga was, or might have been, and recognizing the time we have now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781954245228

Book preview

Also by Yerra Sugarman

Forms of Gone

The Bag of Broken Glass

Aunt Bird

Yerra Sugarman

Four Way Books

Tribeca

For Feiga Maler

1919 – 1942

who died in the Kraków Ghetto

Copyright © 2022 Yerra Sugarman

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sugarman, Yerra, author.

Title: Aunt Bird / Yerra Sugarman.

Description: New York : Four Way Books, [2022]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021046021 | ISBN 9781954245143 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781954245228 (epub)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PR9199.4.S84 A85 2022 | DDC 811/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046021

This book is manufactured in the United States of America and printed on acid-free paper.

Four Way Books is a not-for-profit literary press. We are grateful for the assistance we receive from individual donors, public arts agencies, and private foundations including the NEA, NEA Cares, Literary Arts Emergency Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

We are a proud member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Contents

[I have nothing to see her with]

Aunt Bird

Once

Psalm

Aunt Bird, Conjured

Into the Shell of My Ear

Aunt Bird on What Happened to the Alphabet When the War Broke Out

[Bone by bone, she remembered]

She Lived Amid the Tumult of an Occupied City

[Night after night, what she saw in her sleep]

[The TV’s on mute; its cool glow scrubs the room]

During Wartime, Aunt Bird Reconsidered the Story of Abraham and Isaac

Aunt Bird Opens the Steel Door of Gratitude

She imagined painting all the walls

[That her soul warmed itself in a body which would not persist]

Once upon a time, after she had died

Aunt Bird Recalls the Ladder of the Righteous She Observed During the War

[Day’s hem comes undone]

[Before the city became rind and marrow]

[I’m always embracing her and discovering that one who is thin-boned can also be strong]

She Said, Ours Were Bodies

[She said, Ours were bodies the world peeled]

The dead, their hearts beating under pebbles

[Sometimes, the night held its breath]

[Before the air gorged itself]

[She felt neither joy nor its salt-white absence]

[A voice can be like flesh]

[When she was fenced off even from herself]

[Aunt Bird said she had to heave herself from sleep]

Loosened Inside Me

[I wanted Aunt Bird always loosened inside me]

[For who is she]

[And may there be no more needles]

[See, I say to Aunt Bird, what a sturdy house your soul makes]

[Sometimes Aunt Bird asks, What tethers me to this world?]

Tarnogród, Poland, 1939 / Houston, Texas, 2012

[It is just before the war cracks the land open like an egg]

[An owl’s hoot scoops the pulpy dark]

[Aunt Bird moves to Kraków before the bombardments and before the sky]

[Slowly, the air is cured of its dark calluses]

[Light howls and history peels its own skin]

[Language can bear the everyday grace of slumber]

[We who are a kind of havoc]

[My hands are