Every poet is so different—their language and their grammars so uniquely their own—that while there are usually threads connecting them to others, what attracts a reader to a particular poet’s book is a response as sui generis as the poet’s to the world.

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s debut book of poetry, Salaam of Birds, is a fundamental reckoning between the intensity of life in Israel and the earthy beauty of the desert: water, sand, flowers, fruit. The poems within the collection speak to the transformation that comes from holding disparate elements that comprise a homeland like the Jewish state.

Now, how many Russian novels in translation have you read this past year?
- Audre Lorde (“Notes from a Trip to Russia,” 1976)

The line above is the closing sentence of Audre Lorde’s “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” the opening essay in her renowned Sister Outsider. This essay was written during her two-week trip to Russia and Uzbekistan in 1976, before the dissolution of the USSR.

It’s possible one could go their entire lives and experience a single death, only their own. The aftermath of unpredictable tragedy, there would be nothing to observe, nothing to predicate one’s visions and versions of death.