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Praise for
The Concealment of Endless Light

 

"How does Yehoshua November do it? How does he balance the lofty and mundane with such grace? This remarkable poet finds mystery in kitchens and hardware stores, dry cleaners and classrooms. In the same breath, he describes a soul's journey and eating breakfast with his children. In this world of ours where human beings do horrible things to each other, November looks for souls inside bodies. Certainly, that gives him a perspective on our species. But there is something else, too. Mystics have been trying to 'nail' this something for generations, to name it. November answers this metaphysical challenge—he names the unnamable—via his skillful use of figurative language. But there is more, yet. Friends, these days in our country, we go to school to learn to make sentences and to divide and multiply numbers. But where can we learn awe and wonderment? The answer is November’s humane and deeply searching poems. He has a wisdom which is necessary if one is to travel from one day to the next. November is one of our most brilliant Jewish American poets of this moment."

—Ilya Kaminsky

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"A wonderful poet with a unique vision and distinct voice, Yehoshua November opens worlds within worlds. In The Concealment of Endless Light, he describes poetry as 'that profession of rowing / through the rivers of the heart / with oars made of memory / and sadness,' though in his case memory and speculation are illuminated by the daily wakings of a father and husband scratching out a living as a teacher and backlit by the soul, despite 'a Divine concealment whose diameter is greater / than infinity.' In a moving poem about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, November gathers the dead around him on a street where the 'Jews of Pittsburgh / stand in the rain / holding candles' while 'eleven souls ascend to the region of mystery / then swoop down to hover, incandescently, over their former lives,' consecrating a place where 'no one can explain how [the body] limps forward / but has not faltered.' Neither does this poet falter, but moves forward with dignity and grace."

—Dorianne Laux

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"Elegantly crafted, beautifully philosophical, and passionately devoted to exploring the profundity of earthly life, The Concealment of Endless Light chronicles a quest for the divine amid the ordinary. Never holier-than-thou, the speaker in November’s poems is always conscious of the ways he’s failed his family, himself, and his God. Nonetheless, he persists in reaching out to the divine to illuminate the experiences of a soul in a body."

—Maria Mazziotti Gillan 

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"One of the best books of poetry I've read this decade."

—Liz Rosenberg 

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"[Yehoshua November] writes with rare ease, honesty, humility and beauty about the Divine as well as the mundane; worlds come together in his writing. [...] This collection of spiritual poetry is one that even secularists and skeptics will find engaging and powerful."

—Sandee Brawarsky, Hadassah Magazine
 

"Novem­ber speaks for those who know the tender­ness and frailty of the world and the dreams and con­cerns of being human. Ulti­mate­ly, his poems expose what is con­cealed, and let it rev­el in the light."
—Julie R. Enszer, Jewish Book Council

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"November’s poetry is not only powerful because of its specificity, but its seamless fusing of the mundane and the grave, the comical and the deadly serious. His poems are vivid and cinematic..."

—Alan Zeitlin, The Jewish Press

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"Throughout the collection, November combines the sacred and the profane, calculable and infinite, in a work that would sit comfortably on any modern poetry library shelf." 

—David Rullo, The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle 

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"[For November] the world is not just a blur of passing insignificances but a place where revelations are the very substance of the everyday."

— Shmuel Klatzkin, The American Spectator 

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