Song in Tammuz
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Tupelo Press, Incorporated
Publishing:1st Oct '26
£16.00
This title is due to be published on 1st October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Winner of the International Berkshire Prize, this collection draws from an incredible range of literary forms, from familiar couplets and tercets to footnotes, dictionary definitions, and luminous lyric fragments.
While stylistically daring, even virtuosic, Avia Tadmor’s stunning debut is unified by its enduring engagement with questions of language and alterity. What does it mean to be othered by and through language? What happens when grammar, syntax, and the concepts of identity housed within them are at odds? Does a revolutionary message demand new forms of discourse? “I can say it through the distance of this other tongue,” Tadmor writes.
Indeed, she considers the role of language—from conceptual framework to vast storehouse of history, culture, and inheritance—in shaping the self, ultimately revealing our agency within a grammar and syntax we did not choose. As Tadmor writes, “Her pen is a stronghold, a lighthouse / flickering late in July.”
"Song in Tammuz gives us a lyric voice that speaks—no, sings!—back to tradition, sings with devotion (to a “god attached to the end of your name / like the tail of a mare”), yes, but also with questioning (and whose letters are “the last telegraphs to be sent before the city surrenders”). There is grief yet awareness that as she writes, “a last good lemon hangs from its tree.” There is an incredibly memorable persona, Ruth, both mythical—and our own. There is a story of horror sewn out of silences, out of the unsaid. And, always, there is a song: “first anger, then hunger, then song." This is a marvelous first book."
* Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa *“A speaker in one of Avia Tadmor’s poems says, “We utter
ISBN: 9781961209695
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
94 pages