Collected Poems

The collected work of a poet who turned 102 years old in 2020. These poems, covering sixty years of a free woman’s song, are Naomi Replansky’s hymns to the struggle for justice and equality and to the enduring beauty of life in our dangerous world.Here at long last is the new and collected work by a writer hailed by George Oppen as “one of the most brilliant American poets.” Replansky is a poet whose verse combines the compression of Emily Dickinson and the music of W. H. Auden.Naomi Replansky, a Bronx native, began to write poetry in her teens but published her first book when she was 34 in 1952. That collection, Ring Song dazzled critics with its candor and freshness of language. It was nominated for the National Book Award.Since Ring Song, Replansky has since published three additional collections and translated numerous works from German and Yiddish. This collection, Collected Poems is her life’s work, won the Poetry Society of America’s 2013 William Carlos Williams Award and was a finalist for the 2014 Poets’ Prize.

Praise for Naomi Replansky’s Collected Poems“Naomi Replansky’s poetry rings with reality and wisdom, and it is always song. Her observant, political wit and gravity are as piercing and as necessary now as ever – and I would say more so . . . her voice and her way of reading are among the very best we have.”—Jean Valentine “Naomi Replansky is a major American poet, long overdue for acclaim. She writes skillfully, both in and out of strict form, crafting lines carefully, with concision and rare intensity. Her poems are the real thing; her collected work of a lifetime deserves the widest possible hearing.”—X. J. Kennedy “Here in a book, the work of a life. All the poet Naomi Replansky is here: the dry, quiet voice, the incantatory and familiar rhythms that are never quite what you think they are, the wit, the touch of comfort, and the tongue-lash, the modesty that entirely frees her from trend, and the audacity – above all the audacity, the risk-taking, the nerve of the woman! These poems bear honest witness to what it was to be alive, really alive, in the twentieth century, and I turn to them again and again for courage to face the dark opening of the twenty-first.”—Ursula K. Le Guin “The free and savvy poems of Naomi Replansky soar, in a speech that urgently affirms a strength we’ve almost forgotten we have. Clear as water and as necessary, they quicken our solitary selves. The light pulse of their instantly shared energy shows us each other and joins us in our eagerness to speak out as they do, against confusion. They are bold and embolden us. We hear the true polis alive under the dirty air of truthless ping and we participate in its power. To participate in power is freedom, Cicero says. These poems, proposing sixty years of a free woman’s song, wake us up to it. Their cadences and claims uncover the given world and make us think. We do so willingly because the beat they keep is the rhythm of the heart.”—Marie Ponsot “Naomi Replansky . . . has gained much reverence as a major voice in American poetry for honest work and speaking with clarity.”—The Midwest Book Review

Naomi Replansky, a Bronx native, began to write poetry in her teens and published her first collection, Ring Song, in 1952 when she was 34. Critics were dazzled by her candor and freshness of language and the book was nominated for a National Book Award. Replansky has since published three additional collections and translated numerous works from German and Yiddish. Her Collected Poems won the Poetry Society of America’s 2013 William Carlos Williams Award and was a finalist for the 2014 Poets’ Prize. With her long-time partner, the writer and scholar Eva Kollisch, Replansky received the 2015 Clara Lemlich Award honoring women who have spent their lives working for the larger good. Replansky died in 2023, a few months shy of her 105th birthday.