Apples of the Earth
Dina Elenbogen
ISBN 1-933132-24-8 $10.00 102 pages
In Apples of the Earth, Dina Elenbogen is a poet who lives in several worlds at once. The weather in her poems is the weather all over the world, flood and drought at once. Living in Chicago she is also in Jerusalem, living in her home she is also far away in Africa, and the dialogue she keeps up within herself and outside herself extends her feeling from immediacy to longing. She is a poet who can write about love without embarrassment because for her “love survived in the middle of everything.” With these poems, love survives for us too.
Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Lowercase Jew (Poems) and The Jew in the Lotus
Apples of the Earth is a marvelous first collection. In elegant, luminous language, Elenbogen evokes the places and people she loves and grieves over. Her leaps of imagination are startling: in one deft instant, she can connect commonplace objects to motions of the spirit and the heart. Her tone is everywhere sure and clear, the voice of a born poet.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of The Writing on the Wall and Disturbances in the Field
Dina Elenbogen's poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She has received fellowships and awards in poetry and creative nonfiction from the Illinois Arts Council and she is the recipient of the Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize. She has completed a book-length memoir Drawn from Water: A Question of Home.
Elenbogen has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and teaches in the University of Chicago Writers’ Studio. She lives in Evanston, Illinois with her husband Steve Siegel and their children Sarina and Ilan.