Available September 2024

Also by Joy Ladin: Once Out of Nature

Family
Poems by Joy Ladin

Joy Ladin's most autobiographical and socially engaged poetry collection to date, Family is an intimate exploration of private and public loss, resilience, and love. The book begins with “haiku suites,” an invented form through which her mother's dementia and the poet's growing disability are glimpsed by the light of a blossoming world. The lyric narratives that follow portray a widening family circle that also includes estranged children, God, targeted trans women, and Trump-era America. Laden writes with an open heart and a formal grace as the collection concludes with “Autobiography of My Whiteness,” a reckoning with her belated awareness of her place in America's racial hierarchy.

With an assured immensity of perception that brings Dickinson to mind, Joy Ladin's Family sweeps up heart and spirit into wide, concentric circles: sharp rhythms, wanton rhymes, lines whose quick forays build strength for the shock of a final wave. Laden with joy and solitude, this book ripples out from the unforgettable lyric ‘Sick Psalm’ into poems that aim to forgo even utterance itself.”—Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems

Joy Ladin is a widely published essayist and poet, literary scholar, and nationally known speaker on transgender issues. From 2003 to 2021, she held the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University; her gender transition and return to teaching in 2008 made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Joy is the author of twelve books, including the National Jewish Book Award-winning The Book of Anna, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, Through the Door of Life, and ten books of poetry. She is also a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Paperback / $17.00 (Can. $23) / 978-0-89255-589-5 / 88 pages / Poetry