Country of Glass

Poems

Sarah Katz

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781954622036
• eBook ISBN: 9781954622043
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who offers an exploration of the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. Katz employs themes of illness, disability, war, and survival within the contexts of family history and global historical events. The collection moves through questions about identity, storytelling, displacement, and trauma, constructing an overall narrative about what it means to love while trying to survive. The poems in this book—which take the form of free verse, prose poems, sestinas, and erasures—attempt to address human fragility and what resilience looks like in a world where so much is uncertain.

PART ONE

It’s so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backward.

—“THE DEAD MEN…,” THE WORLD DOESN’T END, CHARLES SIMIC

The Hidden Country, I

Two woolly animals meet,

their bodies as luminous as stars.

But this stillness between them—

I don’t understand.

Da Album

Bemel stole potatoes

from a freight car

to survive

Hantsavichy.

Great Grandma Sonia

watched

as he dragged the sack

past graves he dug

for other Jews,

unaware her daughter Annia

would marry him.

That’s not until New York,

where the past

barely exists, but

the pain lingers,

a ghost.

Until each night,

my father listens

as Bemel and Annia hurl dishes

at the walls before

he takes off

to Jacksonville

in a yellow convertible.

Now, Granny Annia gestures

to the girl

in the painting

hugging twigs

in a Siberian sunset of fog.

“Leestin to me,” she says,

brushing her fire-red hair.

She applies coral lipstick

onto her lips.

“Dis ees my only story.”

I sit with the cracked-faced

dolls on the sofa

as she talks.

“Your Great Grandma Sonia

received Skippy

peanut butter

from the Red Cross

and not knowing what eet vas, used eet

to fill up cracks

in da apartment.”

“Your Great Uncle Lou

jumped out a window

with an umbrella

thinking he could fly.”

“When we left the camp for good,

Mr. Nut, da cat,

cried after us, following the truck.”

The kettle whistles on the stove

as she begins

to play the accordion

Lou brought

to another labor camp

under his clothes.

“Da album, sveetie,”

“Please get me da album.”

Portrait of a Brother and Sister, 1940

She rides turtles across Siberian tundra.

Children shout in Polish from passing cattle cars.

Her brother strikes an angry driver with his gun,

who falls to the ground, mouth frothing like a dog’s.

Run, he shouts to her with a coyote’s eyes

narrow as dark seeds.

Her brother chases her to Kazakhstan wielding

a snake stick. Yellow eyes stalk them at night.

She is six. By twelve, she knows seven languages,

memorizes Aleksander Pushkin, sings operettas

in French and German. In New York, she shapes

new sounds with her tongue. Always,

her brother’s stick follows closely.

How to Be a Child of War

Be five years old

on an ice road in Siberia.

To the left, mountains.

To the right, mountains.

It is -35 degrees.

Up above, your mother in the forest—

too thin to exist—

grinds a double-handed saw

across an oak

with another starved woman.

Watch from the road,

each tree, severing, crackling

under its newly uneven weight,

toppling from the mountain,

down into the Indigirka river.

Your mother who

has eaten nothing

but a slice of black bread.

Your mother, your mother.

The Beginning of Prayer

My father, tangled in the height of adolescence,

wept outside Old Saint Paul’s Church as spring died,

reading Desiderata. The poem lay inscribed

in rock at the rear of the church, where

he counted his blessings. The sky,

he told me, was angry, angrier than most,

and I imagined billowy Michelangelos

swollen with inconsolable rain.

I was eight when he told the story late one night,

after dinner, after all candles had been blown out.

He stroked my back as I lay on his stomach,

burying myself into his large body, thinking

This is the moment I’m supposed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Content Warning
• Contents
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author