Description
Poetry/Literature ISBN 978-1-946104-59-5 Published 2026, Advance Copies Available August 20 2025
Judith Roitman is a professional mathematician and a Zen teacher. In these precise short poems — eight lines, four couplets — Roitman manages to say almost everything you need to know about everything. Her laconic phrases, that seem both to connect and not connect, like shards, open out into unexpected beauty and expansive meaning. This is a sweet book to contemplate, as you would a book of ancient aphorisms. Protected! We are protected! / The vast sea underneath. — Norman Fischer
In Judith Roitman’s Shard, koan-like couplets stream through the open space of the page like moments in a day, by turns or all at once tragic and comic, vast and infinitesimal, mundane and surreal: They scooped out half your body. / Conglomerates stride the earth. As readers we ride these moments into our own transient noticings: Oh God it’s that bird again / hammering away against the tree. Savoring Roitman’s nuanced repetitions and variations in syntax, case, tense, tone, and topic, we ponder the movement of experience and thought into language: the sounding of words, making of marks, reading and rereading of marks in a process that multiplies meanings: Cows drop / against the knife. // Herons rise / from the fog. We open toward the all-of-us making gestures, sounds, and marks to send back and forth amongst ourselves. In confusion and wonder, in love and rage, in terror, grief, and awe, with judgments and sometimes beyond them, we may find ourselves here, for now, participating. Bring me my crutches. / Feed me my silk. — Sarah Rosenthal
How does one exist? Do you miss me? Do you know I’m gone?
In Shard, Roitman’s contemplation of loss, tenderness, and awe, the poet observes and exists at once.
Here, everything matters: the wrongful teeth, hands seen through paper, the burning world, shoulders wrapped in plastic, beauty as a patch.
Here: the inhabitants, known and unknown—the not-yet-dead, the unjustly dead.
Here: One hand is love. Two hands are everything.
Roitman’s spare, illuminated work moves between the explicit and the haphazard—the way the cursor skips like needles. — Maryrose Larkin
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