JEWGIRL, poetry by Charlene Fix

Publication Date: October 15, 2023

Paperback, 134 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-50-9

$25.00 retail, $18.00 from publisher

Of the provocative title of her new poetry collection, Charlene Fix declares “if it has a sting, she appropriates the whole shebang.” Despite describing herself as an “Unobservant Jew” whose personal rabbi is Walt Whitman, in these wide-ranging poems she does indeed embrace the “whole shebang” of her Jewishness, her heritage, identity, and perspective. In her opening poem she recalls how her father called her and her sister tsibeles, Yiddish for onions, an appropriate metaphor for the process by which she peels away the layers of her life experience to arrive at the “slight stem” at the heart of our common humanity, transcending any one faith. “My people are not the only ones / by far who have suffered trauma, then inflicted trauma in return,” she writes. “But because they are my people, I came to the river with Muslims, / Christians, and Jews: all accidents of birth: we enter the world / to find one another and try to stop tears.” What better purpose for poetry, or for life?

Praise for Charlene Fix & Jewgirl

Reading Charlene Fix’s Jewgirl is like visiting a friend’s kitchen with the whole family present—and not just Mom and Dad, but Bubby and Zayde, and people lost in the war, and ghosts from generations back who danced the dances no one knows now, some cracking jokes, and others sighing, still others lifting their drinks to the future—L'chaim!—a future where everyone (friend and stranger, Jew and Goy, Israeli and Palestinian), will somehow find a place at this table of life, this warm kitchen where everyone fits and is fed, is held and beheld, the light leaking out, into the winter night, as if to welcome guests. Read this touching and haunting book and join your place at the table!

—Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps

In Jewgirl Charlene Fix scribes her own Talmud. Though self-proclaiming to be “unobservant,” her poems demonstrate that, in the spirit of Gerald Stern, she “behaves like a Jew,” embracing, with her inclusive vision the spirit of Tikkun, mending the world in a language that—in a seemingly infinite expanse of subjects and tones—lifts story into song. Poem after poem echoes and interweaves her plethora of sources and observations: “kaddish winds are davening the pines.” These are masterful poems from a poet knowing and wise to our capacity for brutality and compassion, poems of great empathy, understanding that we are all survivors and that “the heart’s proclivity” is “to experience the agonies of others as our own,” which is not only a Jewish, but a universal commandment. Not without a bissell schtick, Fix is intensely observant. To somewhat alter the words of James Wright, these are the poems of a grown Jewgirl.

—Philip Terman, author of This Crazy Devotion

The voice of Jewgirl, whose title sets its unabashed tone, is candid, idiosyncratic, confiding, irreverent, devoted. A sprinkling of Yiddish words, like Kosher salt, enhances the flavor. Charlene Fix keeps her balance and her wits about her, “can’t sustain a grudge,” believes in “Unmyopic/Sanity,” has “a quirky gallows sense of humor” that comes with the ancestral turf. She punctures the grandiose, elevates the everyday; her style lightens history’s weight with the vital energy of exuberant “life propelled from tragedy…” And who can resist a world where one’s last supper is Chinese takeout?

—Eleanor Wilner, author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems

About the Author

Charlene Fix had a pretty secular upbringing notwithstanding her maiden name of Cohen, so how did this book happen? She sang about the complex emotional and political legacy of the particularity into which she was born, returned often to that venerable, contradictory, joyful, angsty mishegoss, gathered the poems. An Emeritus Professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design, Charlene co-coordinates Hospital Poets at the Ohio State University hospitals, and, motivated by the suffering of her own people, works for peace and justice for those whose suffering is akin. Charlene has received awards from The Poetry Society of America as well as the Ohio and Greater Columbus Arts Councils, and was a featured author at The Thurber House and The Ohioana Book Festival. She is mother of three and grandmother of two, has too many books yet keeps checking out more from the library, isn’t a very good gardener but likes to toss seeds around to see what transpires, and hikes too. While growing up she heard Jewgirl used as an insider term, but if it has a sting, she appropriates the whole shebang. Her website is https://charlenefix.com