Trying to Speak

Winner of the 2004 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

The voice [in Anele Rubin’s poems] is so new, and yet the movement is so artful, subtle, and modest–there are never any theatrics in these poems. They never yowl, Pay attention to me! … Rubin is on the same wave-length with Tomas Transtroemer and Yehuda Amichai… . The emotional range of her poems, like theirs, is enormous, as is the range of locales, many of which I know well, and yet in Trying to Speak, they appear with a clarity that had eluded me. – Philip Levine, Judge

Anele Rubin’s poems illuminate an astonishing range of emotional experience. Visual, tactile, simple and complex, her words lure you from poem to poem–sometimes exquisite, sometimes austere, always original. – Ruth Stone

This is a powerful and beautifully lyrical book of great wisdom, whose theme is emotional resurrection. – Toi Derricotte