The Lowercase Jew

As dismissal and disdain of Jews speaks through the art of some leading twentieth-century poets, so the poetry of Rodger Kamenetz answers artfully.
Kamenetz explores the questions that haunt our culture: about the voices through which culture speaks, about the identity of poet and poetry and about the capacity of art to harm and to heal.
Whether subjecting the anti-Semitic verses of T. S. Eliot to a literary trial; conjuring the eloquence with which "Allen Ginsberg forgives Ezra Pound on Behalf of the Jews"; or drawing upon personal history, the Torah, and Jewish mysticism to explore the tangled relations of Jewish identity and modern literature, Kamenetz's poems attest to the inexorable power of language.