Reviews and Blurbs
Undertow
In Undertow Barbara Leff demonstrates her strong poetic craft and mastery of confessional
poetics with full force. For example, in her pantoum “My Shame,” the poet confronts the horrific
death of her mother who was gushing blood from her mouth. Her mother’s doctor forced her out
of the room. Nonetheless, she berates herself for leaving her mother to die alone. Undertow is a
searing collection of finely honed poetry.
Karren LaLonde AlenierEditor, From the Belly: Poets Respond to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
The poems in Barbara Leff’s collection, Undertow are full of memories and questions “…as I
walk between rooms to recall why I’m here.” We move through known and unknown
landscapes, both physical and emotional, as the speaker tries to place herself, sometimes through
the use of an actual GPS, sometimes through remembrances. The poems are elegiac in tone,
speaking to the grief of losing one’s parents, the death of friends from AIDS, and the tragic
suicide of the speaker’s sister, all while dealing with her own cancer diagnosis. Leff writes with
fierceness and honesty as she navigates her life. There is an openness to these poems, allowing
us to enter the speaker’s world, to find common ground, as she says in her poem, “Heaven”, “But
what do I know? We’re all searching for the same thing, after all.”
Valerie Bacharach Author, Last Glimpse
In Barbara Leff’s poetry collection, Undertow it feels as if there is a current that could pull the
poet out to sea, yet ultimately she is a survivor who introduces to the whimsy, joy, and tragedy
that come from her deep relationships with family and friends. These deftly crafted poems treat
the quotidian, the metaphysical, and the magical- “as if I could grab a handful of stars from the
sky and toss them on the tiles at your feet.” Sharply observed, heartrending and celebratory by
turns, Undertow conducts us through a lifetime of landscapes its fascination with orientation in
shifting memory and place becoming our own.
Susan Cobin Author, What You Choose
An undertow can sweep a body and its soul away, act as a counterforce, suggest currents riding
beneath the surface. Barbara Leff’s brave and beautiful poems in Undertow explore all three
nuances of her metaphor. Haunted by her sister Roberta’s unraveling, her father’s heartbreak
and humor, the loss of her friend Peter to AIDS, her grandmother’s death, the poems also depict
joy, an undertow sometimes becoming the poem’s turn. We hear the music of alliteration signaling
themes: premonition, Prozac, “hoped for” pain, an astonishing suggestion of plunging down to
heaven. The Orphean title poem both celebrates and mourns Peter, for even as kids “we stood
our ground against the undertow”. Leff’s poems suggest how to remain upright while swept by that
force, Orpheus’ way: by confronting death, even one’s own, with song, by loving beyond loss,
by communing with animals, with tangible memories, humor- gallows or otherwise, the balm of
nature, and by exploring troubles in order to know and understand. The poems offer a bonus too:
moral clarity over error in poems like “Swastika,” “Venom,” “My Shame”.
Charlene Fix Author, Jewgirl & Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat
And God Said…
Barbara Leff 's And God Said... is a brilliant retelling of The Book of Genesis, one of the
foundational texts of Western culture. The biases, gaps and silences of the original are given
voice and texture by Leff's humane and compelling imagination which brings a fresh and
passionate angle of vision to these familiar stories, transforming in the process not only our
understanding of our religious past but also of the contemporary life which is in part a product of
that past. This is a wonderful and exhilarating book.
Alan Shapiro Author of ten poetry collections including Tantalus in Love and Old War Poems
Barbara Leff 's challenge in And God Said... is not only to offer radical alternatives to Biblical
narratives, but to offer new structures for these familiar and time burnished tales. In reading
Leff's poems, I relished the stark retellings of the stories of Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, and a
host of others. Among all the strategies of form Leff 's poetry displays an excellent pantoum
recreating the story of Leah ("What's in a Name") and a marvelous list poem featuring all the
names of the divinity ("By My Names Ye Shall Know Me") give ample evidence that this book
is also blessed with craft's mastery.
Eloise Klein HealyAuthor, The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho
Barbara Leff 's poems stake their place in the landscape of modern Jewish poetry. Her poetic
voice joins the open conversation of Modern Midrash. Every generation layers its own words
onto ancient text. This poetic task keeps our tradition fresh. Her imagination brings the poet's
truth to the lived experience of biblical life. Her words bring the self-reflective quality of the
post-Modern era to the millennia of our tradition's textual culture. The voices we hear in her
poems mix our contemporary inner experience to the commonplace text and bring new
possibility to the ways we can understand our Master Narrative.
Rabbi Eric Weiss Executive Director Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, Retired
Every now and then in literature comes a brilliant conceit.
Even rarer comes a great poem.
Here in one work is both.
Mark DowieInvestigative Historian, author of Conservation Refugees; The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples Even rarer comes a great poem.
Here in one work is both.
Luck
Luck is a collaboration between Barbara Leff and visual artist David Maxim. The poems
represent an exciting period in Barbara’s writing career when she discovered the braided
narrative form which takes two separate story lines and weaves them together to come together
in the end and shed light on each other.
The braided narrative led to the crazy quilt which separates the story lines, one narrative on the
left side of the page, the second story on the right side of the page until the poem resolves in the
final stanza.