Letter from a Place I've Never Been

Hilda Raz is a former editor of Prairie Schooner and was named the first Luschei Professor and Editor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is the editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series at the University of New Mexico Press and the poetry editor for ABQ (in)Print and Bosque Press. Raz is the author or editor of fourteen books, including List and Story. Kwame Dawes is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. John Kinsella is the author of more than thirty books, including Jam Tree Gully and Firebreaks.

“Early on in Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been, a speaker worries, ‘What if I’m broken and can’t be mended, / or worse, the world is broken around me / and I the only whole thing in it?’ Here is the Jewish notion of tikkun olam, that it’s our task to repair what is wounded. Indeed, in this impressive collection showcasing more than thirty years of work, Hilda Raz makes an argument for poetry as a way of healing our brokenness. These are poems that remake the world of ‘melt and fracture’-using language that growls from the page-so that it belongs to everyone, all the ‘odd and splendid’ parts of ourselves worthy of examination, of praise.”-Jehanne Dubrow, author of Dots & Dashes and The Arranged Marriage “I love the immersive experience this book offers. Readers track Raz’s imaginative language across the decades, as she mourns and meditates, catalogs and investigates. Resisting the cultural and technological policing of women’s bodies, the poet evokes illness, recovery, sorrow, and delight. These narrators-gritty, world-loving, tenacious-bind the personal and political in unforgettable family and diasporic narratives. Unprecedented when first published, Raz’s poems about mothering her transgender child have become foundational texts. ‘Some of what I couldn’t stand to lose I lost,’ a narrator states, echoing Elizabeth Bishop, one influence here. Friendship and the natural world console: ‘If the good life is coming / to us in our lifetime, / surely it is here / in this orchard in April at twilight.’ Like her jeweler son’s transformation of wire and gemstone into bracelet and earrings, Raz’s transformations-of body, circumstance, homeplace, passion-work a resilient, wondrous alchemy.”-Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me  “To read Hilda Raz’s Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been is to open a precious gift, to sit down to a feast celebrating a life in poetry. If you’ve read Raz’s earlier work, the poems will be old friends, made new by seeing them in this expansive context. If you have not, you have a journey ahead worth any price, let alone the price of a book. Raz’s poems deal with grief, longing, and loss in all their complicated forms but interwoven with transformations that take your breath away. Her poems are in turns lyrical and challenging, but always precise, each word exactly the right word. And at the end of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been, there are the new poems waiting to be discovered and savored, poems which, to quote a title in the book, serve as ‘Letters from a Lost Language,’ that haunting, that beautiful.”-Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of America that island off the coast of France

• Editor’s Note by Kwame Dawes    Introduction by John Kinsella    What Is Good (1988)IShe Speaks    Yom Kippur    Father    Shabbos    Dishes    Accident    Piecing    Saying Goodbye to the Property    What Is Good    IIFamily    Worry about Meaning    Helios at Bread Loaf, the Album    With Stanley Kunitz at the Car Wash    The Man    Women Raised in the Fifties    Shame, or the Computer Uses of Natural Language    Assignment    Three Ways of Looking at It    Trying to Buy off Death    Lacunae    IIIWhat Happened This Summer    Divorce    Detail    1 September, 100 Degrees    Journal Entry: The Tropics    A Meeting with My Ex-Husband    Version    Pain    Small Shelter    High Ground    IVSome Other Women Now    Plate xii    Widow    Lot’s Wives    Gossip    She    Oracle    Pregnant Woman    Visitant    Cradle    I Am Sick    Visions    VJan’s Orchard, Nebraska    Locus    Sex    Alone    Late March    Look    Piecing the Universe Together with Dresses    Friend in a Distant City    Advice    I Can’t. Yes, You Can.     C3    Prospectus    Life Outside the Self: The Uncertainty Principle    The Bone Dish (1989)That’s Something    Sarah’s Wing    April Teaching, Outstate Nebraska    Diction    Native    Words    Birthday    November Night Driving    Town/ County    Bear    The Sandhills, Early Winter    Conversation    Photograph of a Child Sleeping    What Happens    My Daughter Home from College Tells Me about the Gods    Ambition    September: Getting Married Again    My Dream, Your Dream    Inside the Geese    Divine Honors (1997)PrologueRepair    Narrative without People    Let’s consider the consequences    Isaac Stern’s Performance    II Hear the Name of the Moon and Am Afraid    Weathering/ boundaries/ what is good    To Explain    Mu    Coming Down with Something    Fish-Belly-Mound    “Two Are Better Than One”*    Getting Well    For Barbara, Who Brings a Green Stone in the Shape of a Triangle    Day-Old Bargain    Breast/ fever    IISarah’s Response    Sarah among Animals    Sarah’s Head/ 16 March, Four Months after Surgery    Sarah Fledging    Sarah’s Waltz    Balance    Order    Axe-earrings, abalone shell    Birth    IIIOpening/ Working/ Walking    Hey You    Grieving, she hits the red fox    Mapping/ Bleating    Trope    Sow Sister    Bernini’s Ribbon    Petting the Scar    Teaching, Hurt    Riddle    IVChigger Socks    Daylight Savings: Sandy Creek, Nebraska    Cobb’s Hill Pond    Fuss    Zen: the one I love most holds my tongue    Camarada    From Your Mouth to God’s Ear    “We don’t deserve what we get”     G: But it’s still not all right with you?     Mutation Blues    Insomnia Again    Service    VHot    Dying    Terror: A Riddle    Nuts    Lincoln, Nebraska    Letter of Transmittal    Now    Who Does She Think She Is    Earlier    Vowels    EpilogueGloxinia/ Flicker/ Oxalis    Recovery    My Award/ The Jews of Lukow    Ecstasies    Trans (2001)IAvoidance    What Do You Want?     Drought: Teaching, Benedict, Nebraska    Tough    Names My Mother Knew    Houses    Said to Sarah, Ten    Fast Car on Nebraska I-80: Visiting Teacher    Afternoon, with Cold    Sick    Back    Friday    “The world is not something to look at; it is something to be in.”     IISecrets    Heart Transplant    Footnotes    Doing the Puzzle/ Angry Voices    Prelude    Part Coquette, Part Monster    Trans    Trans formation/ Feathers/ Train Travel    Stone    Before John and Maria’s Wedding    IIIHistorical Documents    Volunteers    Some Questions about the Storm    Lost Jewelry    Mother-in-Law    Women & Men    Some Questions for the Evening Class    Insomnia III    She    Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been    Not Now    Summer    Anna Maria Is Coming, or Maybe Thomas Barton, or Max!     IVHello    The Address on the Map    Wonder Woman’s Rules of the Road    Aaron at Work/ Rain    Sarah Returned to Me, Wearing the Poet’s Gloves    Company/ 3 AM     First, Thus    The Storehouse    Early Morning, Left-Handed    Visitation: Pink Foam Letter    The Funeral of X, Who Was Y’s Mother    All Odd and Splendid (2008)I. History: Everyone today looked remarkableVocation    Diaspora    Childhood    Water Ceremonies    All Odd and Splendid    Wilt    Son    He Graduates from Clown School    He/ She: The Bike    Credo    Spring Snowstorm    Dante’s Words    Sunday Morning, without Couplet    Tyr    II. The Transfer of Power: So absolute and immutableOnce    Storm    The Transfer of Power    An Evening    Infant, in New York    Visit    Four/ Two    Eva Unwraps a Band-Aid    III. War: Button, feather, tassel or stripeComplaint    Flight    The Public Baths    Pets    September 11    Fire Should Be Measured by What Didn’t Burn    Paper Strip    IV. Seeing the ChangesArousal    Coma    A Friend    Her Dream    Objects When the Body Fails    Beloved, 24    Funeral, then Flu    Suite    The Changes    A Body of Water    Elegy for Two Poets    V. The Especial Shape2 AM Migraine    Moving Pictures    Dark Haired, Dark Eyed, Fierce    Professional Travel    Alice    VI. All Odd and SplendidTerza Rima    Now    Tenor Part    Splendid    Love This    Thank You Very Much    List & Story (2020)IAutobiography    The Spa of the Three Widows    Transportation    Home    Go    Late September    Photograph    Here we go alone, and like it better so    Flowers of Immortality    IIWomen and Poetry    Women’s Lib    Collaboration    Women and the Global Imagination    The Burnt Journals    Dear Sky    April    One Toe, Crooked    List and Story    Six Objects in a Gold Foil Box    War    A Covey of Scaled Quail    Another Story    IIIThe Impossibility of Stasis    The Past and the Future    Watching Bulls/ Falling in Love with the Dead    A Conversation about Text    Emma     IVNick Spencer, Two Days Dead    The da Vinci Moon    A Meditation on Respect    Meditation    The Mandala of Now    A Symposium on Love    Pristine    The Sisters    Talking to each other    First Light    Seasons    Letters from a Lost Language    Published and Uncollected Poems (1975–2019)Writing Big    Fiction    Long Night    2 AM, after Dental Surgery    Graffiti    Every Way    Spring Again, Rural Nebraska    Lost Glasses    Anna Bites Her Friend Emma at Preschool    Round/ Square    Dwell/ April    Fragments    Birthday, Red-Tailed Hawk    Blackberries    Up All Night    Abecedarian II    A Story from Mah-Jongg Club    The City of Suffering    Another Story    New Poems (2020)Dear God,     Arms/ Belief    Beloveds    Clothes    Echo    Formal    Seasonal    Looking out the Window, Accordion Polka Accompaniment    Picked up in the Garden, with a Line from Mary Oliver    Eva Sings    Risk    After the Memoir, Revelations    “Nobody Teaches Life Anything”    Policy Discussion, Therapy    A Life    Sentences    The Truth    A Wedding    Credo 23    Failure    Fort Pond    Victory Garden, Grass Skirt    Acknowledgments    Notes