{"title":"Dan Alter","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"my-little-book-of-exiles-book-dan-alter-9781913606947","title":"My Little Book Of Exiles","description":"The poems of My Little Book of Exiles sift through layers of diaspora and return, wrestling with the twin experiences of exile and separation. The diasporas of the collection take place in history, family, and the privacy of a mind as it navigates its daily work. In a set of Labor Poems, Alter captures moments of working in the snow of Wisconsin, under floodlights on the Kenai bay of Alaska, or in the machine-roar of construction sites in the Bay Area, where he has worked for two decades as an electrician. Another set of poems confront the vision of the Jewish people's homecoming to their ancestral land. A philosopher of the religion of labor; and an assassinated Prime Minister are some of the figures which weave in with intimate histories of heartbreak and hope. Coming from a home where the Hebrew Bible was a book of bedtime stories, Alter's work is in conversation with texts as varied as the Hebrew Psalms, the poetry of John Keats and Ezra Pound and the songs of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. The collection concludes with poems exploring the homeland of family made through marriage and fatherhood, the strains and moments of grace that come with them. What can withstand the pressures of distance, the forces from outside and inside that want to pull us apart? The book's strands weave a tapestry of hope even as the poems seek to discover finally what lasts.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743234793745,"sku":"NGR9781913606947","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51766514647313,"sku":"CIN1913606945VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1913606945.jpg?v=1750900652"},{"product_id":"hills-full-of-holes-book-dan-alter-9781594981579","title":"Hills Full of Holes","description":"\u003cp\u003eBirdcall a doorlatch, this book begins, and we enter into a world of forest bathing on trails of the East Bay Area parklands, undertaken while recuperating from a brain injury. This is a refractory world of senses heightened and disrupted: a world of suns blaring, finger-leaves falling, huge beetles glistening, train-horns blendering the sky. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut Alter's third collection goes beyond a document of senses askew in the woods. Whose woods, the poems ask, searching out multiple layers of the landscape in time and space. Texts drawn from first European encounters are pressured in a series of erasures; lyrics investigate the pressures put on the land and its original inhabitants. These include poems of a redwood forest clear-cut twice, a refinery dominating the skyline, and one tracing a creek on its course through parkland and city, dammed into lakes, culverted under mini-malls, until it drains into the bay at the foot of that refinery. Part elegy, part pastoral, part ode to beloved and beleaguered set-asides, \u003cem\u003eHills Full of Holes\u003c\/em\u003e journeys in widening understandings of injuries to body and land, and their possible recoveries.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52683555832081,"sku":"NLS9781594981579","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52751705342225,"sku":"NIN9781594981579","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781594981579.jpg?v=1762320947"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-dan-alter.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}