Aviva-No

Presented alongside the original Hebrew, this poetic sequence is a cry of denial and grief at the loss of Adaf’s sister, Aviva, who died suddenly at the age of 43. The poems function as prayers for her soul as each of the 43 sections assumes a linguistic or religious pose: “Just before I foll asleep I tin/ I soot rite in a language where/ I am deft to de pulse of words,” Adaf writes. Grief spreads around Aviva’s death: “She had a heart heavier than the ocean/ my mother/ and it sank.” Sderot, a mortar-bombed city close to “the darkness beaten over Gaza” is where the poet was loved and tutored by Aviva, as he recollects “and here you set me down, showed me/ the books.” Surrounding this tragedy is the enduring landscape of war, in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv as elsewhere: “And the smell of tearing flesh/ will cling to the sidewalks, to the climbing prices/ of apartments.” If love is “to place in another’s hands/ the right to make us lonely,” this moving elegy asks reader to situate themselves amid the suffering of others. (Nov.)