Praise for Eitan Fishbane's Embers of Pilgrimage:
“In these haunting poems of yearning, grief, memory, and aspiration, Eitan Fishbane takes the reader on several ‘pilgrimages’: to one's own past; to a future free from the deformation of anger; to loving connection with the infinite in another vulnerable human being. Fishbane, an acclaimed scholar of the Jewish mystical tradition, weaves images from that tradition throughout the volume, and yet the poems, vibrant with emotion, are fully accessible to both Jews and non-Jews, to anyone interested in the victory of compassion over anger, in freedom ‘from the prison of impatience and rage.’ We all need to hear this powerful poetic call.” — Martha C. Nussbaum, The University of Chicago
"The poems in...Embers of Pilgrimage reflect a religious sensibility...very deep but also very accessible. They are completely original; nobody else in the world could have written them, but everybody will recognize in them something true...With exquisite sensitivity they capture...those things you can't see when you look directly at them but can see obliquely (the way you can only see certain stars in your peripheral vision). Like Whitman and like the author of the Song of Songs, Fishbane incorporates erotic themes in his religious poems, but with a distinctive pang of grief and longing..." — John Burt, Chair, Department of English, Brandeis University, and author of Victory; Work Without Hope; and Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism
“Written in the acclaimed Jewish tradition of the poet-scholar, Eitan Fishbane’s resonant poetic-philosophical cadences conjure the erotics and ethics of sacred texts and ecstatic metaphors, while celebrating the quotidian. A layered, transcendental poetry that reaches “to the edges of the real/the cliffs of word-smithed wonder,” but is equally attuned to the “multi-toned chords” of a workaday New York, or to a beloved Jerusalem café where “the space is made sacred by the books and the/coffee-nurtured imagination,/and the love,/always the love/dissolution or merger of the profane and the holy.” — Chana Kronfeld, Bernie H. Williams Professor of Comparative, Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
"Eitan Fishbane blends ancient mystical wisdom with today’s fresh reality. In the process, he rejuvenates traditional teaching while enriching our mundane lives. His impassioned poetry illumines our time-bound existence with rays of eternity." — Daniel Matt, author of God and the Big Bang and the multivolume annotated translation, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition
"These lyrical poems tenderly erase the boundaries between the scholarly and the intimate, the textual and the visceral, conflating mysticism with the immediacy of a human life scarred by loss, lifted by kindness and memory."
— Yehoshua November, Author of God’s Optimism (a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize)
"Through whispered covenants of dissonance and longing, all luminal, liminal, hymnal and exquisitely exilic, Eitan Fishbane’s Embers of Pilgrimage, nomadically and pneumatically erupts as a radiant ferocity of mysteries, convergences...where letters blaze through languescapes of concealed corridors and time-cradled eternities..."
— Adeena Karasick, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies, Pratt Institute; Author of Salomé: Woman of Valor
