Darkling

Anna Rabinowitz, editor and publisher of American Letters and Commentary, won the Juniper Prize for her debut, At the Site of Inside Out. She follows up with the book-length poem Darkling, investigating her family's experience in the Holocaust via a fragmentary recollections and textual reclamation, looking for ""the way back to raw footage."" The book's short, unnumbered sections jump from tercets of long lines, to prose passages, to segments that all but ignore the hegemony of the left margin, to unmaskings of pseudo-scientific theoretical constructions, which cannot compete with the fact that ""hundreds of Jews were laid up in a grid-like pattern.... wobbly reliefs of bodies on/ Cobbled stone."" This dense, unsettling volume makes a unique contribution to Holocaust literature. Photos. ( Dec. 1)