A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight
Poems by Hadara Bar-Nadav

MARGIE / IntuiT House Poetry Series
Selected by Kim Addonizio

 

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With a scrupulous and often terrifying sensuousness that invokes butchery and witchery, and with smooth and feverish music, Hadara Bar-Nadav creates a world of surreal excitement. “Every voice, a hiss/ with my name inside// and God in the rafters / hissing too.” Enter here, but walk with care.
- Alicia Ostriker, author of No Heaven and The Volcano Sequence

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s smart, prize-winning poems do the hard work of revising our stories. The poems see clearly atrocities both domestic and international and reproduce them in brilliant chips of what would be color if it were paint. This poet’s tongue cracks open language to project fractured images from our intellectual systems - architecture, mathematics, ekphrasis, even the reduction of body to experience. A brave, fierce, and brilliant first book.
- Hilda Raz, author of Trans

Whether writing ekphrastic poems on a painting by Diebenkorn or remembering the family dramas of her urban childhood, Bar-Nadav produces taut, concise, and densely packed lyrics that often leave the reader breathless. A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight is an explosive, often painful, and wholly realized book: reading it is a special pleasure.
-Marjorie Perloff, author of Wittgenstein's Ladder and Differentials

These poems are graceful and moving, exploring issues of gender and spirituality with intelligence, keen insight, and occasional surrealism. Here a fairy is drawn to a glass of milk, electric fences sing, a woman lives in a teapot, but Hadara Bar-Nadav's leaps of imagination are not merely surprising. They are also urgent, characterized by a probing intellect and the desire to communicate both immediate experience and careful thought. This is an exceptionally strong first book.
-Kevin Prufer, author of Fallen from a Chariot