Sesame

Remarkable for language that is both lush and precise, these painterly poems of family, love, loss and memory explore the possibilities for reconciliation in our complicated times. An award-winning poet, Marshall draws on subjects as diverse as his split Arabic/Jewish heritage, his early experience working in a Southern steel mill and a Midwestern canning factory, and his present life in the modern cities of urban America.

Publication date: November 1, 1993

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 96 pages

ISBN: 9781566890151

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who emigrated from Iraq and Syria, Jack Marshall now lives in California. He is the author of the memoir From Baghdad to Brooklyn and several poetry collections that have received the PEN Center USA Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a nomination from the National Book Critics Circle.

“Marshall is a master image maker and an original voice at a time when many American poets are doing imitations of each other.”

—Choice Magazine

“There is a daring in his poems . . . that I find exhilarating, original and experimental, he remains a poet of Eros—intensely human, loving, and engaged with the world.”

—Morton Marcus

“The power of Jack Marshall’s poetry is disconcerting because of its unadorned nakedness. . . . There is no far on the lean bones of his words.”

—Library Journal

“Poetry that parallels closely (as it invents it) the consciousness of our time.”

—Andrei Codrescu

“Marshall never fakes or obscures or relents; he is his own man and speaks true.”

—Poetry