hills full of holes
“Birdcall a doorlatch,” this book begins, and we enter into a world of “forest bathing” on trails of the East Bay Area parklands, undertaken while recuperating from a brain injury. This is a refractory world of senses heightened and disrupted: a world of suns blaring, finger-leaves falling, huge beetles glistening, train-horns blendering the sky.
But Alter’s third collection goes beyond a document of senses askew in the woods. “Whose woods,” the poems ask, searching out multiple layers of the landscape in time and space. Texts drawn from first European encounters are pressured in a series of erasures; lyrics investigate the pressures put on the land and its original inhabitants. These include poems of a redwood forest clear-cut twice, a refinery dominating the skyline, and one tracing a creek on its course through parkland and city, dammed into lakes, culverted under mini-malls, until it drains into the bay at the foot of that refinery.
Part elegy, part pastoral, part ode to beloved and beleaguered set-asides, Hills Full of Holes journeys in widening understandings of injuries to body and land, and their possible recoveries.
“Beguiling. Bewildering. Beautiful. Foreboding. Hills Full of Holes, Dan Alter’s multivalent, musical collection of poems, evokes our planet’s majesty and peril as developers bulldoze forests and birds seek new migration patterns: “The sky turns/ its back on us but we/ can’t tell because it’s/ also blue.” Recovering from a traumatic brain injury, our poet hikes trails in the woods and hills overing the East Bay in California, seeking to read the world or have the world read him..”
—Spencer Reece, an Episcopal priest and author of The Clerk’s Tale and The Road to Emmaus
Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited
“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
My Little Book of Exiles
Winner of the 2022 Cowan Writer’s Poetry Prize
“Could I have come from nowhere,” asks this poet, who searches his irretrievable past and mysterious present for meaning. Through gorgeous, ambitious, impeccable lyrics, provisionally and with a deep reverence for mysteries, he finds it again and again. This smart, funny, sad, kind book is an act of salvage, and solidarity, a pleasure to read, a wonderful achievement and a gift to us all.”
—Matthew Zapruder, author of Why Poetry and Father’s Day