Trying to Speak

Winner of the 2004 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

"The voice in Anele Rubin's poems] is so new, and yet the movement is so artful, subtle, and modest--there are never any theatrics in these poems. They never yowl, Pay attention to me . . . Rubin is on the same wave-length with Tomas Transtromer and Yehuda Amichai. . . . The emotional range of her poems, like theirs, is enormous, as is the range of locales, many of which I know well, and yet in Trying to Speak, they appear with a clarity that had eluded me."-- Philip Levine, Judge

"Anele Rubin's poems illuminate an astonishing range of emotional experience. Visual, tactile, simple and complex, her words lure you from poem to poem--sometimes exquisite, sometimes austere, always original."-- Ruth Stone

"This is a powerful and beautifully lyrical book of great wisdom, whose theme is emotional resurrection."-- Toi Derricotte