"Yerra Sugarman’s powerful first book, Forms of Gone, reveals a rich poetic gift that is at once unique and eternal. The daughter of Holocaust survivors who settled in Canada, Sugarman transforms that difficult subject as the alchemist beats metal into gold. She writes of the impact of history on daily life, lifting the particulars of individual experience into universal truths."—Grace Schulman, PEN American Center
"Forms of Gone is a powerful first book by a poet mature in experience and worldview, whose strength is drawn at once from a unique perspective and a multilayered engagement with the counterpoint of syntax and poetic measure. . . . the daughter of Shoah survivors . . . her subject is the overlay and undertow of history on daily life, as it regards that very specific experience, radiating out into a meditation on the palimpsest that is any examined human existence. But first of all, there is the reality she witnessed, as the witnesses themselves began to disappear, with a novelist’s (or a painter’s) eye for wry or heart-wrenching detail, but with a poet’s linguistic compression and invention, with a poet’s genius for recreating the particular so that it also implies the human universal."—Marilyn Hacker
About the Author
Yerra Sugarman has an MFA in painting from Columbia, a credential that other poets might try to acquire. She recently won a "Discovery/The Nation" Poetry Prize, and a George Bogin Poetry Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 2000. She teaches writing at New York University.
September 2002