Staying The Night

In Staying the Night, Ilene Rudman's debut collection of poems, we find an outlook tender and empathic. But also wonderfully capable of fierce anger and irony, often displayed in adventurous experiments in shape and form. In a moving tableau where a "purring cat sits on my sister's still still chest..." we witness this acute tenderness. Lest this become sentimental-and not only a loving last look-the poet reveals the cat has just alerted family to death, like a quiet night crier. In turn, she can protest cruelty almost gently, as in her love for an alpaca with a "Modigliani neck," only to discover the animal may be new meat for connoisseurs. But not at all gently, the "Darfur Diet" uses irony to present starvation in all its horror. In another protest poem, the staccato voice of a witness at The Hague, in tortured inflections, is shocking and believable: we know Rudman has done her research. And who remembers humor in contemporary poems? In a poem about a Jewish girl trying pork sausage and loving it, in an airplane high above a world with too many prohibitions, Ms. Rudman amuses and instructs too. Further, she weaves a contemporary fairy tale with a " phantom rabbit" who tackles everything difficult. But if the rabbit's owner does not obey, the creature will scream her " terrible rabbit scream." In essence, this book shows expansive tonal quality. When there is not the urge to laugh, there are places where tears might come, especially during a pandemic when we all need that rabbit and this writer's humorous take on our strange world.
-Suzanne E. Berger, author of Horizontal Woman (Houghton Mifflin)
These are poems intimate with the many kinds of nights we live through. Some nights bless us with love, good dreams, rest. Others bring nightmares, worry, and the ruminations in which one wanders through memory, wondering what was right and what went wrong. Then there is also the kind of night one spends with a loved one who is dying. And sometimes the given night can arrive at a literal or metaphorical dawn that reminds us of life and love starting over again. What light we have might not be all we want or need, but as Ilene Rudman writes in these wise, moving, and beautifully crafted poems, it is "enough for me to go by."
-Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)