Description:
Finalist for the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry
Brief description: Yehoshua November is the author of two books of poetry, God's Optimism, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and Two Worlds Exist, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, VQR, and on NPR. November teaches writing at Rutgers University and Touro College.
Review Quotes:
"November manages to bring the same gravity and grace to both the common and the cosmic."
-The Rumpus
"[November's poems] spiral from the quotidian to the otherworldly, and back again. Each nearly bursts from its taut parameters, aching with sorrow and reverence, stitched with humility, love and pain, pulsing with passions both earthly and divine."
-The Chicago Tribune
"These poems are like a documentary film-close to life, narrating episodes from everyday life (many of them happening within the Chassidic community). But under the skin of these poems a flame of passion-or compassion-is hidden. Hidden and palpable at the same time. That's how Yehoshua November creates such beautiful surprises for his readers."
-Adam Zagajewski
"I have read these beautiful poems many times over. Each time I find something new and wonderful and deeper and more spiritual therein. Two Worlds Exist is an even stronger book than November's first collection. So full of sorrow and humility and reverence, love and pain and the actual stuff of our lives-the guilt of the small cruelties we inflict; the large cruelties life inflicts; wavering and unwavering faith that there is something greater than ourselves behind it all."
-Liz Rosenberg