My Shtetl

Open to any poem in Robert Cooperman s My Shtetl and be so delighted you won t want to put the book down. Much more comes alive here than one man s childhood Brooklyn neighborhood, its Yiddish flavors, its tales of a family of American Jews who don t look, no different from real folks. He may have been a nebbish in his youth, tripped up by kids so cool , they had only to look at him , and he'd tumble to the ground, but as this deeply engaging collection demonstrates, Robert Cooperman became a poet with the talent and compassion to deliver our recognizable world and its people in poems rich in detail and consequence. Andrea Hollander Budy