Description: This poetry volume explores themes of loss, grief, and remembrance and includes visions of women's silencing and agency, complexities of family relationships, and moments of hope and resilience.
Brief description: Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz where she teaches creative writing, American and Women's Literature, creative nonfiction, memoir, and Holocaust literature courses. Her work has been published in many journals including The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Broadkill Review, The Cream City Review, Home Planet News, Kansas Quarterly, Phoebe, Memoir (and), the Westchester Review, and Wind. Her work also has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. She has had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000). One chapbook, The Earth Was Still, was recently published by Finishing Line Press (2011 and another Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time by Word Temple Press (2014). Most recently, she co-edited with Laurence Carr a collection of works by Hudson Valley women writers entitled A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill Press 2013), which won the USA Best Book Award for Anthology.
Review Quotes:
In FORAGING FOR LIGHT, Jan Zlotnik Schmidt traces, with a precise yet tender lyricism, the complex arc of a woman's perceptions, losses, new and enduring attachments.
--Mary Gordon, Author of There Your Heart Lies
In this powerful collection, Jan Schmidt 'treks through paths of memory' to imagine the 'words and worlds' of the witness. Whether a daughter caring for an aging parent, a mother yearning for her son, or a woman foraging for relief, these poems transport us into the quiet rooms of longing. 'Do you hear my words as a whisper?' Indeed we hear the stillness of the fierce whisper and the sudden tremble of a life opening into song.
--Thomas Dooley, Author of Trespass
This collection draws us into a maelstrom of memory (the poet's, our own, the world's) within the seas of our souls. In "this place where treasures were lost / where treasures were found" we evaluate all that's transpired over time as fragments of the forsaken swirl past, and we discover something of beauty even amidst the losses and challenges of life. Generations of women connect through blood, art, place, history, and nature. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a true artist of the blue depths capable of stirring innermost emotions and yet, though we are moved by the weight of the waves, we readers are reminded to look up to the surface to find the sun. In the end, with all our dreams and sorrows, regardless of age, gender, or time period, we are still simply "children foraging for light.
--Nicole M. Bouchard, Editor and founder of The Write Place at the Write Time literary journal