"Ladin draws the reader into a world of harsh truths, uncanny beauty, inspired erudition, ironic wit, and cadenced music . . . Imagination rules, wedding poetic forms to unflinching meditations on human suffering, terror, love, and unbearable loss. Despite the ubiquity of evil and death in her poems, there is, in Yeats’s words, ‘a gaiety transfiguring all that dread.’"—Herbert Leibowitz
"Joy Ladin’s Impersonation completes the trilogy of gender transformation begun with her Transmigration and Coming to Life. In these poems, ‘an egg/ that cannot hatch’ is cracked open. The bird breaks free. The book’s thrill is its long vision, the past held intimately, the future a holy liberation."—Greg Miller
About the Author
Joy Ladin is the author of nine books of poetry, including Lambda Literary Award finalists Impersonation and Transmigration, award winner Coming to Life. Her work has been recognized with a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship, a 2016 Hadassah Brandeis Research Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship. She is the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University.
December 2017