Prof. Sulak's "City of Skypapers" Finalist for National Jewish Book Award

Professor Marcela Sulak's latest book is a finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry.

Sarah Wetzel describes this work:

The title of Marcela Sulak’s fifth collection of poems, City of Skypapers, feels apt for its deliciously long lines hang suspended between the holy and the home, between the rituals that “elevate the loaf” and those of Shabbat that “place roses in their vase, candles in their stick.” This American Israeli poet, teaching and raising a daughter in the Middle East, acknowledges both the “wreckage of the Byzantine villages” as well as the peril of living in a place where “the antennae at the  military base quiver” and where “no one knows what time our daily missile will appear.” At the same time, this poet embraces Tel Aviv’s quotidian humor writing an ode to the city’s garbage collectors whose “clarity” she craves and praising “the season for shedding shoes…every last one of them black.” The brilliant cadence of Sulak’s poems, “keeping pace with the current” of the Yarkon River along which the poet runs, not only enact, but also celebrate what it means to be alive “in a place where the flowers are old enough to have stories.” These poems should be read, perhaps even sung.