In my ongoing struggle to pull myself out of this damnable pit of festering depression, I’m returning to studying Hebrew and to finishing Shez’s manuscript. Today I am sending it off to Alice James for their translation open reading period. Yes I am, although I have only ten hours left to get everything together and turned in.

As I do that, here’s a recent piece on Shez from an Israeli website: Poem of Shabbat

And here is a very very rough translation of the article:

Shez is a poet and a writer in a well established and important and central figure in the development of community [name of her poetry workshop series]. It is also offering of workshops, and people who know her workshop know they  are not only a place of writing and creativity but also a place of deep mental processes.

Shez is a poet with a special sound, sometimes blunt, sharp and honest to the extreme, which  shows with honesty her hard life story. Her poetry, as well as a weekly column of her  published poems, has strong presence of violence and pain on one side and also tenderness and intimacy and closeness. This tension between the two poles of the soul, of our existence, makes her singing shaking and strong. Her poetry is willing to devote itself to the truth, the truth which is also extreme and distorted, it is willing to devote itself to comfort and compassion. The honest poetry evokes not only solidarity, it also gives the reader the feeling that there can not be pretense or coloring of the world too bright colors, integrity like that allows her poetry to penetrate deep our psychological structure.