“Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited achieves the seemingly impossible, dancing lightly across the politically, historically, and socially burdensome terrain of Israeli daily life. Ben Moshe’s Hebrew is playful, witty, and incisive, and Dan Alter’s beautiful translation brings this tightrope walk of levity and weight to vibrant life in English.” —Yael Segalovitz, author of How Close Reading Made Us

“Yakir Ben-Moshe’s poetry has an unstoppable energy that only few contemporary poets, anywhere, possess…This is one of those special cases when poetry is, in fact, found in translation. Open this book on any page. What will you see? The lover calls. Then visits with a box of tissues. Meanwhile, outside the horizon is spread open like a photo album hung upside down. One eyelash drops from the sky. What do you learn? You learn that in this absurd place some call time we live together with this strange gift some call wonder. And I, for one, am grateful to Dan Alter for reminding us of that, via his marvelous translations of Ben-Moshe that indeed read like first-rate poetry in English.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa