Family Paperback by Joy Ladin

Product Details

• Publisher: Persea Books (2024-09-10)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 80 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780892555895
• Item Weight: 124.74 grams
• Dimensions: 20.96 x 13.59 x 0.76 cm

Joy Ladin's most autobiographical and socially engaged collection to date, Family is an intimate exploration of private and public loss, resilience and love.

It begins with “haiku suites,” an invented form through which her mother's dementia and the poet's growing disability are glimpsed by the light of a blossoming world. The lyric narratives that follow portray a widening family circle that also includes estranged children, God, targeted trans women, and Trump-era America. The book concludes with “Autobiography of My Whiteness,” a reckoning with Ladin's belated awareness of her place in America's racial hierarchy. Written with an open heart and a formal grace, Family is the latest important work of poetry from a Lambda Literary Award finalist and National Jewish Book Award winner.

About the Author

Joy Ladin is the author of many poetry collections, including The Future Is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017). She has also published a memoir, Through the Door of Life: a Jewish Journey Between Genders (2012); a critical study, Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry (2010); and a work of creative non-fiction, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (2018). She is a professor at Yeshiva University, where she holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English. A nationally recognized speaker on gender and Jewish identity, Ladin has spoken around the country and has been featured on a number of NPR programs, including "On Being with Krista Tippett." She lives in New York City.