Contributions by Zara Raab

An Interview with Chana Bloch

By | Book Review, Poetics, Prose

(first published in San Francisco Book Review) Chana Bloch has published four books of poetry — The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey. She is the co-translator of The Song of Songs (with Ariel Bloch) and The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (with Stephen Mitchell), as well as …

Book Review: Farang by Peter Blair

By | Book Review, Prose

Farang: Poems by Peter Blair Autumn House Press, 2009, 64 pages, paper, $14.95, ISBN: 978-1-932870-34-3 “Farang,” we quickly learn in Peter Blair’s book about his years in the Peace Corps, means “foreigner” in Thai. The clear images of these melodic narrative poems evoke the legacy of the Vietnam War years, the tensions between Thais and …

Interview with Poet Jacqueline Berger

By | Book Review, Prose

First published in San Francisco Review of Books Berger is the author of three prize-winning books: The Mythologies of Danger (the 1997 Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award); Things That Burn, (Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry); and The Gift That Arrives Broken, (Autumn House Poetry Prize). Garrison Keillor recently read …