Leah Horlick

In the canon of contemporary feminist and lesbian poetry, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD breaks silence. A fictionalized autobiography, the poems in this collection illustrate the narrator's survival of a domestic and sexual violence in a lesbian relationship. There is magic in this work: the symbolism of the Tarot and the roots of Jewish heritage, but also the magic that is at the heart of transformation and survival.These poems are acutely painful, rooted in singular and firsthand experiences. But Horlick also draws from a legacy of feminist, Jewish and lesbian writers against violence: epigraphs from the works of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt act as touchstones alongside references to contemporary writers, such as Daphne Gottlieb and Michelle Tea.In this reflection on grief, silence and community, we follow the narrator's own journey as she explores what it is to survive, to change, to desire and to hope. At once unflinching and fragile FOR YOUR OWN GOOD is a collection withtransformation at its heart.

For Your Own Good

Moldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora. In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women's lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations. With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick's poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. No one ever thinks they might be the dragon, Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together. If Leah Horlick's second book invited us to witness, this time she draws from her Jewish heritage and takes us back to show us how to read the landscape and mind-scape and tell us what the texts left out. This is an accounting, a calling, an invocation, a return, a skilful mediation on how to remember when the 'names of the oppressors are blotted out'. -- Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days Every poem in Moldovan Hotel is a room thick with ghosts. Here, Horlick takes the language of the past--used to dehumanize and unmoor--and crystalizes it around revelation after revelation. A graceful, striking collection. -- Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

Leah Horlick

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