Post Classic

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Women’s Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. erica kaufman’s poems command me to follow the circuitous routes her words travel on the way to the occasion of a poem; I am swept along by her singular and sorrowful grammar. To read her is to know recombinant, reactive linguistic space, where poetry is coming from and always trying to get to. There’s something neurological about her style but then you have to map it onto literary and personal history… and how is that done? Her ‘narrator without personality’ is nonetheless wailing; she fears dying ‘gay and alone in the woods covered in ticks.’ Holding the high concept and the bloody high stakes together is paradoxical; it’s hard. Only a master can do it.–Simone White