Wonder Wheel
"Wonder Wheel is a deeply moving collection that captures the circular nature of life—Harriet Shenkman both recalls her ancestors and rears her children in these poems—alongside its unpredictability...Harriet Shenkman is an exacting and yet still fanciful poet, and Wonder Wheel an exhilarating, yet sometimes harrowing, ride."
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–Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik and Landscape with Sex and Violence
"In poet Harriet Shenkman’s Wonder Wheel, a woman recites the ingredients in her mother’s borscht as a spell to cast out her own hunger: beets, cabbage, onions, beef, salt, dill. Each of Shenkman’s vivid poems casts a spell as she tenderly conjures lives lost to the Holocaust and other lives lived in its long shadow. My mother knew the random hand of mercy, she writes. Also including poems about a spirited youth in New York City and widowhood after a long and happy marriage, Wonder Wheel is well-named after the Coney Island ferris wheel. It, too, presents a long view that inspires awe."
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–Suzanne Cleary, author of Crude Angel
"Wonder Wheel is a deeply moving collection that captures the circular nature of life—Harriet Shenkman both recalls her ancestors and rears her children in these poems—alongside its unpredictability...Harriet Shenkman is an exacting and yet still fanciful poet, and Wonder Wheel an exhilarating, yet sometimes harrowing, ride."
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–Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik and Landscape with Sex and Violence
"The clear-eyed poignancy of Harriet Shenkman’s “Wonder Wheel” is stunning. I am writing to recommend it. Nearly every one is written on a threshold where the meaning or the motivation of a vivid past experience is comprehended: details that the child perceived, depth that for the adult resonates. I admire how many pieces conclude with poise, rather than resolution. For these are hard subjects: parents who fled the c. 1930 trauma of Eastern Europe where their siblings perished, a once glorious groom’s “slow withering.” How does one survive poverty? a pogrom? history? memory? a loved one’s memory loss? one’s own regrettable youthful actions? “I was, it seems, the ringleader,” Shenkman declares, of her role in tormenting a 5th-grade teacher. These poems retrieve the past’s details, examine conscience and, as well, assuredly celebrate indelible impressions of the decades. This admirable and timely manuscript mourns and affirms—Kiev, Brighton Beach, the surviving diaspora, the Seder, persistence."
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–Mary Gilliland, author of The Devil’s Fools