Silk Elegy

Foreword by Molly Peacock

 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist 2003

Paterson, New Jersey, once the silk weaving capital of the United States and a center of radical unionism, provides the setting for a narrative poem by Gash. Through these connected poems, told in the voices of three members of a Jewish family at the start of the last century, Gash weaves a story about the immigrant sweatshop laborers who left their indelible mark on this mill town, while she unravels a story of family madness, love and sacrifice.

Sondra Gash grew up in Paterson, NJ. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Calyx, The Paterson Literary Review, and U.S. 1 Worksheets, and her full-length collection Silk Elegy was released by CavanKerry in 2002. She has received grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Corporation of Yaddo, and won first prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition. In 1999, the Geraldine Dodge Foundation awarded her a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Arts. She lives with her husband in New Jersey, where she teaches writing and directs the poetry program at the Women’s Resource Center in Summit.

A Turban of Handkerchiefs

all the time
Mama’s headaches

she lives under turbans
I help her wrap them

hot wet handkerchiefs
rolled and twisted

a wobbly crown
on her head

in her bedroom
day folds into night

even at noon
Mama hides under the covers

shh   close the door
I need quiet

pull down the shades
I need dark

but even the quiet
not quiet enough

even the dark
not dark enough

Silk Elegy is the story of a family fabric that is almost rent in half and its rescuing restoration, not through miracles, but through steadiness of human connection—the human weave. Gash always keeps in mind a larger story, that of the history of anti-Semitism that brings the Bronskys to Paterson, and of the beginnings of the labor movement that was to hold the silk industry accountable for its workers. This book is not a collection of poems, but a single poem, standing on the integrity of its parts, just as individuals’ integrities create a social fabric.
— Molly Peacock

From the world of early-twentieth century immigrant experience, Sondra Gash has fashioned a compelling work of art. She respects history in her summoning up of the world of the silk factories; she respects narrative in her piecing together several points of view to tell a complex story. Best of all, her words throb with the delicate, relentless energy of the human pulse. You can hear these people and see them and feel deeply for them. She scants neither the bright opportunity America presented nor the suffering that opportunity could occasion. Silk Elegy shows that the genre of the long poem is alive and well.
— Baron Wormser

Sondra Gash’s Silk Elegy is a family saga, a story of memory and madness, of the nascent labor movement, of love, growth and healing, told mainly in the voice of a girl—so says her mother—“from a long line of rhapsodic women.” Silk Elegy is poignant and beautiful in its feel for detail, the sad and rich textures of life. I read it in one sitting, and it brought a lost world to life for me.
— Alicia Ostriker

December 2002
123 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.5
$14
978-0-9707186-1-7