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"I have taken on the names/ . . . belonging to those I loved, who loved me. Their river stones/fell into my pockets," writes Doris Ferleger in her beautiful and deeply insightful chapbook, To Claim Loneliness. As a child throwing pieces of ritual bread into a river on Rosh Hashanah, the speaker "used to worry the fish might eat my sins and die." As a woman, the speaker wonders, "if grief left ungrieved/causes all discord," and if "the point is-(as a Hebrew song says)-to not be afraid." Finally, Ferleger offers the reader this moving message: "Maybe the only part/of the brain worth remembering-is the heart."-Alison Hicks, author of Knowing is a Branching Trail, You Who Took the Boat Out, and Kiss In this strong and moving collection, To Claim Loneliness, Ferleger shows us poetry is possible after Auschwitz, that it resides in that ineffable space of not knowing where "Yiddish ended and Polish began," and how sweetbreads "heal" her "father's war years of raw/potatoes and piss." My favorite poem is "Be Happy and Never Forget." I love that it contains no trace of bitterness. The first poem, "Rivers," pulls us strongly in the flow of life, and the last poem, "At the Ghost Ranch" brings us back to the river, its "unfiltered river water." This is poetry of intergenerational witness, and it touches our deepest places in the heart/mind. -Renee Rossi, author of Triage and Motherboard Doris Ferleger once again stops us in our tracks with her mastery of language and emotional depth in her chapbook, To Claim Loneliness. Like the mare she imagines herself to be in one of her powerful poems, she says exactly what she wants to say with a shake of her shiny mane. I challenge anyone to finish this volume without the need to meditate on the depth and breadth within its pages. -Lew Maltby, author of Smiling Axes
