Shake & Tremor
Shake & Tremor reviewed by Suzanne Edison in Adroit
Shake & Tremor reviewed by Aaron Cole in The Pembroke Magazine
Shake & Tremor reviewed by Katie Manning in her series Poetry Rev
“The God of Debby Bacharach’s Shake & Tremor wears black leather boots and shaves her head on the day she destroys Soddom and Gammorah-she’s that kind of God. But she’s also all about doing her work-women’s work, which is the work of this book, which means: love and survive. Bacharach builds this book of allegories about the contemporary complications of romantic and sexual relationships around the stories of wives: Sarah and Hagar, Lot’s wife, Potiphar’s wife. But it also is a book of revelations and angels-if by angels you mean what Bacharach’s Hagar means: “Angel is the word I say when I mean/strength of will.””
“Jewish tradition teaches that there are 70 faces of Torah-70 insights for each word of the sacred text whose narratives and laws and mysteries lie at the heart of Creation. In Shake and Tremor, Deborah Bacharach reveals the face of men resolute in and haunted by their acts in God’s name, of women who wonder and want and become their own rescuing angels, of a deity who looks strangers in the eye and walks unafraid-the face of our lovers, our friends, the people we are when we think no one is watching. This collection is not a sacred text, but it is a revelation - brilliant, honest, painful, beautiful, and always unafraid.”
What other poets are saying about After I Stop Lying
The poems all sounded like the truth to me. This sensuous, brash, smart collection rockets around the universe with great confidence. We are deep inside the personal visions, the life of our narrator, then we suddenly considering Greek myths, stories and characters from sacred texts, and various histories from our world—wars and memories of other countries, the places our poet knows because of travel or imagination, because it seems the whole world matters to her. This is a book by a poet who has kept her eyes open; the book is a pleasure to read because her mind and heart are open, too, and we sense the urgency of her images as she creates a world for us.
Deborah Keenan, author of 12 books, most recently From Tiger to Prayer and, so she had the world
Bacharach’s debut collection explores one woman’s search for a well-lived life. By extending the boundaries of daughter, mother, wife and lover, she creates a modern day narrative turned strangely askew. Whether the poet finds the guidance she seeks in “learning the gods” or “in breasts round as cellos,” lucky readers will delight in the journey.
Susan Rich (Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist's Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, The Cartographer's Tongue)
Like thumping melons you have to have a feel for when the poems are ready. Bacharach bids us to taste her words at the moment they are done to perfection. It’s a joy when a poet slows us down and gives us life ready and ripe. These poems are a pleasure.
Gary Glazner (How to Make a Living as a Poet and Founder of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project)
After I Stop Lying returns to us the real: fat with hope, bright with Old Masters, wise about not fitting in, uncomfortable about assimilation. Always in these poems Bacharach is alive to the world: “it’s coming through my skin, / the sound of the spoon against the cup,/ the sound of the rain, the sound of the chair scraping.” By turns mordantly funny (“my student/…cannot learn the paragraph. I’m not talking/concept here, like when a new idea begins;/ I’m talking a push on the tab key”) and exquisitely powerful (“I cannot know that I will bear a child,/ that she will be whole,/ that her heat will flood my body”), After I Stop Lying is a rich book, replete with insight, sense, and feeling.
Sharon Kraus (Strange Land and Generation, editor at Literary Mama)
"[After I Stop Lying] ...hypnotic, erotic, thrilling and lusty, the poems in this volume make graceful, startling leaps between past and present, myth and mundane modern life, body and scripture, self and other. "The New Joke" surprises with its fresh and chilling take on the ordinary experience of diversionary laughter just at the moment when tragedy gets its foot in the door. In Bacharach's poetry, integrity effortlessly shares space with sexual hunger; love of her children shares room with a fantasy of leaving a perfect six-year old boy behind. In the title poem, the poet suffers appetite-hobbling pain over having lied to her husband about a broken promise; yet she writes, with humor and sensuality, in the poem, Asking to Borrow a Friend's Husband, "I want to slip my hands under that shirt/ to be on my knees, sink my mouth down/like the last bee finding the last bloom."
Peggy Shafer (Sleeping in Damascus)