Dead Men's Praise

A witty and formally versatile collection of poetry exploring life, faith, and history by the Witter Bynner Prize-winning poet. With  Dead Men's Praise, Jacqueline Osherow gives us her fourth and most ambitious collection of poetry to date. Her hybrid inspiration ranges from Dante's terza rima, to free verse, to biblical psalms, all delivered in a casually conversational voice. Combining the self-mocking inflections of Yiddish jokes with the pure lyric inspiration of biblical verse, these poems range in theme from Italian hill towns to contemporary art installations in Los Angeles to the vanished Jewish world of the Ukraine. Her effortless humor and sharp insights take us from imaginings of the future to recovery of the past, and her distinctive voice becomes a fusion of the sublime and the down-to-earth. "Like Elizabeth Bishop, who wove her voice into a sestina so effortlessly you forget the form is there, Osherow makes villanelles, sonnets, and even Dante's terza rima feel genuinely conversational." —David Yaffe,  The Village Voice