Kaddish for My Father: New and Selected Poems 1970-1999

An integrated meditation in poetry and prose, this collection is about a working-class European-born Communist who died in 1997, after two years in a nursing home. Passionate and lyrical, Scheier writes of her father’s horrifying childhood in pogrom-torn Europe, her years of conflict with him, and the peace they came to in the time before he died. These poems pulse with a beautiful intensity and clarity her meditations on death and the mourner’s entry into the land of ghosts and ancestors are haunting, while those that focus on how the world reacted to her father’s illness and death are written with heartbreaking honesty.