SPRING SALE đź“š Buy 3+ Books | Get 25% Off

The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021, Irena Klepfisz

Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021

Irena Klepfisz

Collected poems of pivotal Jewish lesbian activist

Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry (2023)
Finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, Berru Award for Poetry, in memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash (2022)


A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. In her introduction to Klepfisz's A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, Adrienne Rich wrote: "[Klepfisz's] sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless." Her Birth and Later Years was a Finalist for the Jewish Book Award and winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
  • Publish Date: Dec 6th, 2022
  • Pages: 296
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.50in - 6.60in - 1.80in - 1.30lb
  • EAN: 9780819500168
  • Categories: • American - General• LGBTQ+• Jewish Studies

More books to explore

Book Cover for: Feeld, Jos Charles
Book Cover for: Punks, John Keene
Book Cover for: Blizzard: Poems, Henri Cole
Book Cover for: Bury It, Sam Sax
Book Cover for: All Its Charms, Keetje Kuipers
Book Cover for: Boy with Flowers, Ely Shipley
Book Cover for: The Book of Daniel: Poems, Aaron Smith
Book Cover for: He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices, Stephen S. Mills
Book Cover for: A Working Life, Eileen Myles
Book Cover for: Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Book Cover for: A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings, Eloise Klein Healy
Book Cover for: Leaving Holes & Selected New Writing, Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya
Book Cover for: A Palace of Pearls, Jane Miller
Book Cover for: Mysterious Acts by My People, Valerie Wetlaufer
Book Cover for: The Twenty-Ninth Year, Hala Alyan

About the Author

IRENA KLEPFISZ (Brooklyn, NY) taught Jewish Women's Studies at Barnard College for 22 years. She is the author of four books of poetry including Periods of Stress, Keeper of Accounts, Different Enclosures, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, and a collection of essays Dreams of an Insomniac. She was co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology. An advocate of the Yiddish language and active in its renaissance in the United States, she has published poetry and essays have appeared in Jewish Currents, Tablet Magazine, In Geveb, Sinister Wisdom, The Manhattan Review, Conditions, The Georgia Review and Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures. Her Birth and Later Years was a Finalist for the Jewish Book Award and winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.

Praise for this book

"Her verses on rebel womanhood, violent histories, queer love, and dissident, diasporic identity are urgent reading for the present."--Molly Crabapple, Lux Magazine

"Her work can at first seem prosaic and understated, but her style gathers its power slowly and steadily, sneaking up on you perhaps even more strongly due to its apparent flatness...Klepfisz is a poet who has seen a lot and whose work offers a lot in return."--Dale Boyer, The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide

"Her verses on rebel womanhood, violent histories, queer love, and dissident, diasporic identity are urgent reading for the present."--Molly Crabapple, Lux Magazine

"Her Birth and Later Years published this year by Wesleyan University Press, is an exploration of that terrain of ambiguity, between death and survival..."--Rokhl Kafrissen, Tablet Magazine

"In terrible times poetry comforts, challenges, and sustains. Irena Klepfisz has been doing all these through the decades. With this book she gives us an enormous measure of grace. It is evidence of the work done to change the world--a vision of and commitment to justice in the largest sense. We are fortunate, all of us, to have it."--Dorothy Allison, author of Cavedweller

"This book is an absolute treasure for the readers of Irena Klepfisz, for readers of poetry, lesbian literature, and/or Jewish literature...The poet's voice simultaneously transcends time and is also deeply embedded within it."--Zohar Weiman-Kelman, author of Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women's Poetry

"A profound work of martyrs and lovers. Intimate with history and the natural world, Irena's vibrant intelligence has a vulnerable heart. At every turn, from the cataclysm to the quotidian, a deep desire to connect and reach for truth illuminates and transcends these pages."--Sarah Schulman, author of People in Trouble and Let the Record Show