Crossroads

An artist as well as a poet, Yala Korwin has many colors on her palette. In her latest book, Crossroads, she walks us through her gallery of words with poems about nature, poetry, wart, war, immigration, and grandchildren. In "Connections," she assigns the color black not to mourning but to "musicians/in formal attire." "When I am No Longer" pictures the author returning to earth as "snow sparkle" or "wind whisper." Her opening poem "America! America!" records the fluttering of the immigrant's heart on approaching New York harbor. And her powerful sonnet, "Widows," plumbs the wound that never heals: "each to her cold nest, with her secret load, /where no one waits, where silence has the floor." The last word of this ambitious book is "hope."

Carolyn Raphael

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"I hang on tight between heaven and hell," writes Yala Korwin, a poet thoroughly grounded in the pleasures as well as agonies of living. Aging, loss, and mortality may stalk these pages, but the refining fires of her "private/busy/crematorium" produce, instead of despair, an indomitable wisdom, joy, and acceptance. Along with deep awareness of life's many heartbreaks, and compassionate understanding permeates these poems in endless variations, whether it be taking in a stray cat, wishing Samuel Beckett well, or being glad for daughter's growing independent life even if it diminishes one's own.

George Northrup, PHD, President of Fresh Meadows Poets


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This new collection by poet Yala Korwin is cause for profound celebration. Like every work by this highly gifted poet and visual artist, it is a gift to readers who yearn for the clarity, the lyricism and the deliberate appeal to both mind and heart missing in so much that calls itself poetry today. The painter is evident in these poems, in their close observation and love of detail; so are the wife, widow and mother, the survivor and the intelligent multilingual reader familiar with other cultures lost beside the "crossroads" of war and immigration.

Rhina P. Espaillat
12 Charron Drive
Newburyport, MA 01950