Wild Domestic: such contraries, deftly held in balance, lie at the heart of Natania Rosenfeld’s debut collection in which poems are energized as much by the poet’s life-affirming, lush, appetitive drives as they are reined in by her sober-eyed vision of caged birds of prey and flayed rabbits; I am thinking in particular of the remarkable sequence inspired by Soutine: “The torso stretched / like pulled meat, / a skull, vacant bloody / mouth at the point / of the genitals.” Rosenfeld knows how to write to the tight, serrated measures of duress—war-ravaged Europe haunts her imagination—but in the end it is the robust, androgynous body and its runaway anima that gain the high ground: “In her teeth/now a rose, now a dagger, / she slashes her world.” —Gabriel LevinWild Domestic Muse
“Natania Rosenfeld’s poems are inquiries of the self that are inseparable from the strange meanderings of history. Whether she takes in the paintings of Soutine, the English countryside, an Assyrian relief, or zones of central Europe, her poems embody a resonant cosmopolitanism and a grace and wit that will compel any reader to follow her journey.”—Peter Balakian
“Wild Domestic: contraries, deftly held in balance, are the heart of Rosenfeld’s debut collection in which poems are energized as much by the poet’s life-affirming, lush, appetitive drives as they are reined in by her sober-eyed vision of caged birds of prey and flayed rabbits. Rosenfeld knows how to write tight, serrated measures of duress—war-ravaged Europe haunts her imagination—but finally it is the robust, androgynous body and its runaway anima that gain the high ground: ‘In her teeth / now a rose, now a dagger, / she slashes her world.’” —Gabriel Levin
NATANIA ROSENFELD grew up in Oberlin, Ohio and spent periods of time in Germany and Israel. Her poems, essays, andl3F
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