Song in Tammuz

Winner of the International Berkshire Prize, this collection draws from an incredible range of literary forms, from familiar couplets and tercets to footnotes, dictionary definitions, and luminous lyric fragments. While stylistically daring, even virtuosic, Avia Tadmor’s stunning debut is unified by its enduring engagement with questions of language and alterity. What does it mean to be othered by and through language? What happens when grammar, syntax, and the concepts of identity housed within them are at odds? Does a revolutionary message demand new forms of discourse? “I can say it through the distance of this other tongue,” Tadmor writes. Indeed, she considers the role of language—from conceptual framework to vast storehouse of history, culture, and inheritance—in shaping the self, ultimately revealing our agency within a grammar and syntax we did not choose. As Tadmor writes, “Her pen is a stronghold, a lighthouse / flickering late in July.”

Avia Tadmor’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, The New Republic, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Tadmor has received support from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adroit Journal’s Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program. Previously, she taught writing at Columbia University, where she directed the Columbia Artist/Teachers program, promoting no-cost arts education in schools and community organizations in New York City. Currently, she is clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Born in Jerusalem, she lives in New York.