Covalence

Poetry. Veterans. War. Jewish Studies. Covalence explores what it means to come home--from war, from loneliness, from questions too immense to answer. Says Hilary Tham Capital Collection judge Michael Klein, Covalence is one of the most original manuscripts I've ever read. Completely haunted--read: motivated--by history, war and, as it happens, life in a Veteran's hospital, the book succeeds as a kind of homage not only to the triumph over adversity, but what it means to live between the living you make and the living you just barely survive. And the poems here are filled with surprising imagery and speech. It is, finally, a book about how to be brave. Fred Marchant adds, The poems in Joseph Zealberg's Covalence explore many painful forms of spiritual and social alienation that accompany what we now call 'the moral harm' done by traumatizing violence. From poems that address family experiences during World War II to those that address the experience of veterans of our most recent wars, this book's verbal and imaginative energies help renew our sense of how crucial to life the 'covalent' bonds between us actually are, and help us remember that we must, as Auden once wrote, 'love one another or die.'