Divine Honors
Copyright © 1998
by Hilda Raz
Wesleyan UP
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This elegant and moving collection documents Hilda Raz's experience with
breast cancer. The journey, from diagnosis to mastectomy, from denial to
humor to grief and rage, is ultimately one of courage and creativity. The
poems themselves are accessible and finely wrought. They are equally
testaments to Raz's insistence on making an order out of chaos, of
finding ways
to create and understand and eventually accept new definitions of good and
evil, health, blame, personal boundaries —
in short, a new sense of self.
These poems remain intimately bound to the world and of the senses,
becoming documents of transformation. — from the jacket
The best of the poems are breathtaking — the sensuous imagery,
the sounds she
repeats for the pleasure of reading, and the surprising juxtaposition
of images. I
love this book of poems — grief and longing turned into poetry.
— Walter McDonald
Transgressive and transcendent, Hilda Raz's new poems are
intimately involved
with the physical, corporeal world, and constantly making
the leap of faith necessary
to its re-embodiment in words. These poems push the boundaries of what
language can do to enunciate perception. Their beauty, their clarity,
their mystery equally compel. — Marilyn Hacker
Divine Honors is a rare book, one that does honor to its subject
and transcends it at the same time. An unflinching account. ... Divine
Honors illuminates much more about a woman's life that has,
mysteriously, remained shadowy in so many other accounts of women's
lives. Few books change your way of viewing the world. This one does.
— Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
Many of these poems refer explicitly or obliquely to [Raz's] experience with
breast
cancer; others deal with domestic relationships and her struggle to make
sense of —
and, literally, to experience sense and sensuality — after her
mastectomy.
... Raz
brings intelligence and imagination to the task of understanding and
expressing
her
own travail. Ultimately, she's not sorry for herself, she's interested in
herself.
— Publishers Weekly
A collection of lyrical, graceful, and challenging poems that speak of
life's gifts, its
"bruises," and its capricious nature. Not a solace in verse form ...
this is instead a
work for the serious reader of poetry, who will appreciate her language
and style.
The poems draw upon Raz's past, her child, even our connections to nature.
In the end, life is what you are given and what you make of it.
— Library Journal
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Trans
Copyright © 2001
by Hilda Raz
Wesleyan UP
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Raz's varied and serious new collection plays a range of styles while sticking closely
to the
poet's life. About half the volume describes Raz's troubled, but finally heartwarming,
experience with her daughter "Sarah," who changed her sex to become Raz's adult son
"Aaron." Other poems examine Raz's extended family she is especially good on the very
old (in a shocking poem set in a nursing home) and on maternity and childbirth. —
Publishers Weekly
What subject could be harder for a mother to document than her daughter's sex-change
operation? "Aaron is glad to be rid of breasts. I look/ in the mirror and see nothing
familiar,/ scars and absence." Some of the strongest poems in this collection by poet
and anthologizer Raz (Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer) focus on
that transformation: "You're the one that had the sex change./ I've always been as I
am." ... Raz captures the pain, grief, and acceptance beautifully. — Library
Journal
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What Becomes You
Copyright © 2006
by Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz
U of Nebraska Press
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"Being a man, like being a woman, is something you have to learn," Aaron Raz Link remarks.
Few would know this better than the coauthor of What Becomes You, who began life
as a girl named Sarah and twenty-nine years later began life anew as a gay man. Turning
from female to male and from teaching scientist to theatre performer, Link documents the
extraordinary medical, social, legal, and personal process involved in a complete identity
change. Hilda Raz, a well-known feminist writer and teacher, observes the process as both
an "astonished" parent and as a professor who has studied gender issues. All these
perspectives come into play in this collaborative memoir, which travels between women's
experience and men's lives, explores the art and science of changing sex, maps uncharted
family values, and journeys through a world transformed by surgery, hormones, love, and
... clown school. Combining personal experience and critical analysis, the book is an
unusual — and unusually fascinating — reflection on gender, sex, and the art of
living. — from the publisher
What Becomes You is a radically strange, deeply moving, unique book, a mother and
child story like none you've ever read. There is nothing in our literature remotely like
this story of personal transformation, a non-traditional story of coming of age and
letting go told in a non-traditional way that challenges all of your assumptions about
gender, family, stability, and social harmony. You will love this book, these people, and
their candid, tough-minded bond. — Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory
and A World of Light
What Becomes You is a tranny memoir/rant/documentary that reads like a whirlwind
of James Joyce, William S Burroughs, and Sarah Schulman, delivering a dizzying tour of
gender worlds and netherworlds from a multiplicity of viewpoints. —
Kate Bornstein, author of Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens,
Freaks, and Other Outlaws
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What Is Good
Copyright © 1988
by Hilda Raz
Thorntree Press
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Hilda Raz commands a diction which
gracefully marries the beautiful and the
crude truths. The voice in these poems
speaks of our human condition with such
authority that we cannot turn away. It is
a voice which sings as well, and the
music is unerring. — Marilyn Krysl
Hilda Raz's substantial and varied
collection of poems, What Is Good, is
distinguished by her immediacy of address, and
by a lyric fluency that sweeps the reader
along through rhythmic turns and
undulating phrases. This book is a pleasure
to read for its music, its emotional honesty,
its thoughtfulness, and its richness of
detail and image. Most of the poems are
grounded in family situations, moments
of happy intimacy or of pain, and in
familiar places, both indoors and out,
vegetables in the kitchen, flowers in the
garden. The speaker of these poems is
aware of her Jewish heritage, her various
roles as a woman, and, above all, her own
reaching humanity. This is a mature and
accomplished book. — Robert Pack
Practical, tender, bitter, sensuous, philosophical,
at times metaphysical the voice
of Hilda Raz moves steadfastly through
experiences of great pain and great pleasure,
human and womanly weakness and
strength. What Is Good is a first book of
poems that is skyborne, earthbound,
dipped in salt water, and swimming with
life. — Alicia Ostriker
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What the Critics Say
Bibliography
