Present Tense

"A searing book-length poem ... an unbridled account of an apocalypse-in-the-now." ---Publishers Weekly

"`Ask time to make the pieces fit,' Anna Rabinowitz writes as the structures---as is her way---a masterful book-length poem. Its forms alternate between imperatives and prayers, between lyric, statement, anaphoric chant, jingle, and abecedarian. Each section is multi-tracked in the voices of victims and victimizers. Hard-edged, un-predictable, and intense, the work all but lurches out of your hands. Hold on." ---Forrest Gander

"The relation of time to violence constitutes the central question of this piercing work. Using a wide range of voices and various forms, from litany to quotation to dialogue to nursery rhyme, Rabinowitz tries to occupy the present as a kind of prayer that could disengage the hurtling fall of time and disarm its inevitable news. It is news we recognize, and while her goal is impossible, the beauty of the attempt is deeply moving." ---Cole Swensen

"Anna Rabinowitz's Present Tense is packed with urgent questions about morality, mortality and god. Through anaphora, acrostics, interviews, letters to famous figures, postcard questionnaires, counterintelligence interrogation manuals and contorted nursery rhymes (to name just a few of Rabinowitz's inventive strategies), she summons up a past where `god was a ravenous god/ a mouth before words, `and a present in which `Hearts blacken in unblossoming.' It's fierce and unflinching reckoning." ---Matthea Harvey