Author Description

Review Is History amenable to notions of redemption, healing, and forgiveness? Or is such just an illusion, if not a lie? J.J. Steinfeld s potent poetry bears witness to the second possibility. The son of Holocaust survivors, he cannot - does not - will not adopt either the 'forget' or the 'forgive' nostrums with which calamitous History is supposedly resolved. Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds is an archive of unimaginable horrors that are rendered both unforgettable and unforgivable. That the perpetrators of industrial-scale genocide are dead does not make them unassailable; that their victims are also deceased does not make their witness less salient. These are truths that Steinfeld pursues through verse that sounds agonies and anxieties. In these poems, the Post-Holocaust period reads as an existential confrontation between those who are determined to remember and to remind and those who wish to render the mass destruction of human beings as merely a policy of the past, suitable for popular consumption - i.e. entertainment - now. The jolting insistence of these poems is that the Third Reich cannot be exorcized or the Holocaust excised from our daily consciousness. --George Elliot Clarke The somnambulist storyteller of J. J. Steinfeld's poem 'Inescapable Stories' had a hundred possible destinations / the day before a thousand / but tonight only three.' These are the options offered to poets transcending the archives of horror. In Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds, a tender and terrifying book, J. J. Steinfeld rehearses the words for redemption by murdering nightmares, 'transforming gas chambers and crematoriums / into swaying trees and colourful clouds of God s breath,' and rearranging the air we share with every living thing into a sound walk that leads to the possible. --Linda Rogers There's something about Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds, the latest book of poems by Canadian fiction writer, poet, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld, th