The Open Hand holds the parts of a broken world, the destruction caused by the very systems that were designed to produce order, meaning, and beauty. This collection is at once a gorgeous love song to the fragments, “each moment filled to its brim by bewilderment and yearning,” and a warning against the dangers of structures that separate us from ourselves and the world we know to be true. The experience of traveling through these poems is remarkable—all of the intensity of being an exile, while catching glimpses of the road back through the small, redeeming beauties of the daily.
—Jennifer Boyden
Heartfelt, meditative, and ultimately redemptive, David Axelrod’s new poems strike at the heart of our existence. That his vision is both grand and universal as much as it is clawing after the smallest of details, which makes reading his work such a visceral experience, only speaks to Axelrod’s humanism and mastery of poetic registers and idioms. Like Miłosz before him, he too aspires “to a form / surpassing all other forms,” so that our “broken cries” could be heard. Indeed, heeding the voice of God at the same time as scraping his “boots on curbs,” he doesn’t look away from “local sorrows, dullness of lives,” but rather lifts “a great burden into the air” by writing poems equally profound and fierce in their intelligence and humility. Do you, dear reader, want to know where joy comes from? Open this fine book to any page and begin reading—it won’t be long before you see your own face “glowing softly in the shelter of cypress.”
—Piotr Florczyk
