Blood Honey
Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2009.
Winner of the Alice di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America
for a manuscript-in-progress, selected by Jane Hirshfield.
Poems from this collection have appeared in Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Salmagundi, Southern Poetry Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly and other journals, and are reprinted in Jewish in America, When She Named Fire, The Pushcart Prize, The Face of Poetry, and other anthologies.
This book can be puchased on Amazon.com
Listen to Chana Bloch reading "Brothers" Listen to Chana Bloch reading "The Discipline of Marriage"
Listen to Chana Bloch reading "Reprieve"Reprieve
We were drinking coffee in her pre-war flat,
four walls, Pompeiian gray
to match her complexion.
An old Jewish woman in Prague.
Her dead husband laughing in a dapper suit,
fedora, cigarette, one arm around a life
flash-frozen and set at the table
beside the Czech pastries.
She held me with her skinny hand.
"I could have left after the war with my baby
and started over." And then,
half to herself: "Did I make a mistake?"
Her baby was translating
into a broken German I could manage.
What a question to ask a green girl like me,
still too married to regret a marriage
I thought I chose.
Still three or four wars away from knowing
when a question
isn't a question, just a gasp of loss --
but mine to translate.
She poured coffee, passed the kolacky, awaited
my verdict. Yes, you should have left.
No, you did the right thing.
As if one could reprieve a life even now
by pointing a finger
left or right.
"These poems of intimate memory and sure-handed imagination survey the human condition with a tender, compassionate, and unflinching gaze. They take place in the world of the daily -- they eat, dress, make love, ponder, remember, mourn, and observe. They know some things about life that are hard to put into words, and for those things, they find words, and more. Chana Bloch's poems carry their reader into a hard-won, music-ripened wisdom."
-- Jane Hirshfield, citation for Poetry Society of America's
Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress
