Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 by Irena Klepfisz

National Jewish Book Award Finalist 

Listen to our interview with the author on the Shmooze.

Collected poems of pivotal Jewish lesbian activist

A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. In her introduction to Klepfisz's A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, Adrienne Rich wrote: "[Klepfisz's] sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless."