Prayers for the Lost & for the Living

In Prayers for the Lost & for the Living, Dina Greenberg explores what it means to be human. Ultimately, time and place do not make us what we are. At the core of our being, it is yearning for connection, for care and concern, for deep love. In these poems and stories, the churning of one's heart provides the tension: grief and hope, these are our defining emotions. Greenberg reminds us that hope is stronger.~JILL GERARD, Lecturer University of North Carolina Wilmington, Editor, Chautauqua Literary Journal."If you turn to Dina Greenberg's latest book of poems and stories, Prayers for the Lost & for the Living, looking for solace and consolation in religious, in spiritual belief, in nature or in memories of the past, good, safe times, you will be disappointed. This is a brave book, a subversive book. Beginning with the first poem, 'In Times Like These,' while it suggests comfort in remembrance, in the chanting and the calling out of the elongated syllable 'oooommmmm,' forrelease, instead we find ourselves falling into an abyss of sound. Not release but an encompassing of actions that bring grief. The death of an old beloved dog and its burial, death of parents, the Muslim rite of the cleansing of a corpse-the body not whole, only the pieces that can be salvaged. The repetition of 'this woman is not me, but she could be me . . . I rarely pray / but perhaps I will begin.' Imagining a young Jewish woman in Bosnia during World War II. Everywhere, Greenberg asks for our empathy, our identification. One poem, 'First Born,' asks for us to empathize with a mother elephant whose infant is stillborn. And with Greenberg's masterful writing, how can we not. She doesn't shy away from the hard experiences of life but she lets us know the importance of tears, that really feeling our grief is the way that will bring some relief. And finally with the birth of a human child, the poet admits, 'a good deal of effort, / and something gentle in each step . . . floats beyond my grasp of mathematics / of everything they could not teach me.'" ~ANNE BECKER, Human Animal, Poet Laureate Emerita of Takoma Park, MD