The Kangaroo Girl

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Judith Baumel's third book of poetry, THE KANGAROO GIRL, detects religion at the scene of many crimes: from the great disasters of the past to the small calamities of Jewish American life in the ethnic neighborhoods of New York City. THE KANGAROO GIRL is also a personal book, a meditation on being a daughter and a mother, and what it means to survive loss. "Judith Baumel's new poems are inspiring.... Sophisticated and subtle prosodic effects find their match in the poet's intellectual alertness.... An important achievement by a remarkable poet"—Wayne Koestenbaum. "I love Baumel's poems, their restless bravura intelligence, their verbal pyrotechnics leavened with sorrow and the wisdom they've earned in sorrow. THE KANGAROO GIRL is interested in everything historical, from the medieval persecution of the Jews to the toys of technology, to the stories of our bodies. She charts the inexorable changes that choose us, and those we choose"—Gail Mazur.