The Book of Who Are Was

San Francisco poet Benjamin Hollander explores, through a negotiation with poets of the past and present such as Paul Celan, Edmond Jabes, and Anne-Marie Albiach, how to "project memory on stage." Recognizing poetry as a theatrical field, a performance so to speak, The Book of Who Are Was contemplates the process of poetic creation in which it is actually the reader's or spectator's memory that is projected upon the stage or text. Opening his book with an imaginary dialogue with Celan, Hollander develops a poetics of translation in which letters and words appear or disappear while remembering and "crossing over" each other. The result is a startlingly original poetry, a series of mysterious, transformative encounters among figures, occasions, and voices of the past, of the poet, of the reader - creating and re-creating the conversation of a book in which poetry becomes "a gift," "...a thing to refuse you. Repeatedly given. At a moment's notice. Yes, clarity in the sense of silence."