When Creation Falls, Poems by Izzy Wasserstein

Paperback: 104 pages
Meadowlark, May 2018
ISBN-13: 978-0996680196
ISBN-10: 0996680195 

Retail Price: $15.00

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“Izzy Wasserstein writes and lives an original life, no holds barred, and be ready to trek unknown terrain. She ranges from corn chip factories to ‘fog-thick’ rivers. She narrates and lyricizes the urban landscape, peopling it with preachers and panhandlers. This is a skilled writer who will lure you into her world. You will not be able to forget it.”

              ~Denise Low, 2007-09 Kansas Poet Laureate, author of Shadow Light

“. . . an archeological excursion into origins of knowledge and doubt, homecoming and expulsion, real monsters and fictional faiths, and the soul of place and time. Izzy Wasserstein is a time traveler of a poet, from her ‘Report to William Stafford’ about the immortal and amoral wind, to her confluence of Columbus’s landing and biblical Isaac in ‘1492.’ She writes with great verve and vision, continually unearthing memory and history to show the layers of loss bleeding through the present, reminding us that ‘we drag our world with us, even to the depths.’”

~Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate, and author of Everyday Magic: Fieldnotes on the Mundane and the Miraculous

“In When Creation Falls, Izzy Wasserstein guides us through her Topeka upbringing, the blink of millions of years, tornado sirens, and the sermons that don’t always deliver. She gives powerful voice to the golem, her past namesake, poverty’s ghosts, the time traveler, the bends in lonely creeks, metaphorical riffs on cancer, and bison skulls. These inspiring poems are personal, political, and persistent in reminding us that even in confronting our fears of falling short, we are always writing to discover the lasting warmth of love, to find what lies in the footnotes, and to ‘reject the sin of silence.’”
~Juan J. Morales, author of The Siren World and The Handyman’s Guide to End Times

“. . . as transparent as glass — not a window, but a corrective lens, restoring detail and dignity to world of distortions and cynical simplifications. This is a poet furious at injustice but suspicious of fury.”

~Eric McHenry, 2015-17 Kansas Poet Laureate

Izzy Wasserstein