What do you think?
Rate this book
Everything Thaws: A poetic cycle
The northern lights
above me, undulating with the sky’s darkness
over a vast whiteness of the earth, and cupped
between these polarities, belonging
nowhere, I ran
R.B. Lemberg’s poems are a manifesto of memories, unearthing worlds that are gone and poignantly present: their childhood in the Soviet Union, suspended between Ukraine and the permafrost of Vorkuta, among the traumatized, silent, persecuted members of their Jewish family; Lemberg’s coming of age in Israel, being the other wherever they go, both internally and externally, in multiple identities, languages, genders; and the arrival in “the lost land” of their America, where they have put down “tentative roots.”
Every line in this stunning, lyrical memoir is chiseled with the poignant precision of ice into a coruscating cascade that engulfs us with the author’s sensations of solitude, anger, grief; sometimes hurling like an avalanche, sometimes tenderly unfolding like constellations in a circumpolar sky – leaving open the possibility that with the disturbing truths covered for decades, the thawing permafrost from Lemberg’s past might also lay bare layers of love.
above me, undulating with the sky’s darkness
over a vast whiteness of the earth, and cupped
between these polarities, belonging
nowhere, I ran
R.B. Lemberg’s poems are a manifesto of memories, unearthing worlds that are gone and poignantly present: their childhood in the Soviet Union, suspended between Ukraine and the permafrost of Vorkuta, among the traumatized, silent, persecuted members of their Jewish family; Lemberg’s coming of age in Israel, being the other wherever they go, both internally and externally, in multiple identities, languages, genders; and the arrival in “the lost land” of their America, where they have put down “tentative roots.”
Every line in this stunning, lyrical memoir is chiseled with the poignant precision of ice into a coruscating cascade that engulfs us with the author’s sensations of solitude, anger, grief; sometimes hurling like an avalanche, sometimes tenderly unfolding like constellations in a circumpolar sky – leaving open the possibility that with the disturbing truths covered for decades, the thawing permafrost from Lemberg’s past might also lay bare layers of love.
82 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2022
27 people want to read
About the author
R.B. Lemberg
44 books253 followersR.B. Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe to the US. R.B.'s Birdverse novella The Four Profound Weaves (Tachyon, 2020) is a finalist for the Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, and World Fantasy awards, as well as an Otherwise Award honoree. R.B.'s poetry memoir Everything Thaws will be published by Ben Yehuda Press in 2022. Their stories and poems have appeared in Lightspeed Magazine’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, We Are Here: Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction
Anthology, and many other venues. You can find R.B. on Twitter at @rb_lemberg, on Patreon at http://patreon.com/rblemberg, and at their websites rblemberg.net and birdverse.net.
Anthology, and many other venues. You can find R.B. on Twitter at @rb_lemberg, on Patreon at http://patreon.com/rblemberg, and at their websites rblemberg.net and birdverse.net.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 26, 2023
"my mind is forever thawing, and all the dead with it"
without question, one of the best books of poetry i've ever read.
without question, one of the best books of poetry i've ever read.
May 2, 2024
Very amazing
December 28, 2023
I bought this book a couple of months ago, but I've been waiting for a time I could sink into it and not rush through it. I will definitely be reading it again.
March 11, 2024
This was a collection where I took no notes, not because nothing moved me, but because all of it did, the entire thing at once. And it is all so personal to the author, a sort of memory in poetic form, that it felt false to pick out lines or even poems that I identified with or felt some type of way about. It was all their life, and it was made up of so many elements, so far removed from me — immigration after immigration, gulag, legacies of war and ethnic cleansing, parents locked in their grief, estrangement after estrangement.
Even the theme here, Everything Thaws, is less a cause for hope than for another kind of grieving — that which you thought was permanent will also melt away.
I could not put this down. It felt important to bear witness to, and to think about the harms we pass down generations when we don't have the space, tools, or sometimes the inclination to unlearn them. In the end there is not so much joy as there is a new, chosen community, the determination to do better when they can.
And to not be silent.
Even the theme here, Everything Thaws, is less a cause for hope than for another kind of grieving — that which you thought was permanent will also melt away.
I could not put this down. It felt important to bear witness to, and to think about the harms we pass down generations when we don't have the space, tools, or sometimes the inclination to unlearn them. In the end there is not so much joy as there is a new, chosen community, the determination to do better when they can.
And to not be silent.
October 6, 2023
A tremendous work.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews