The Lost Horse Press: 2017 - 78 pages
The Open Hand: Poems
“The Open Hand holds the parts of a broken world, the destruction caused by the very systems that were designed to produce order, meaning, and beauty. This collection is at once a gorgeous love song to the fragments, “each moment filled to its brim by bewilderment and yearning,” and a warning against the dangers of structures that separate us from ourselves and the world we know to be true. The experience of traveling through these poems is remarkable—all of the intensity of being an exile, while catching glimpses of the road back through the small, redeeming beauties of the daily.”
The poems in David Axelrod’s eighth collection journey across the upper Rhine and Alps to contemporary West Jerusalem and far northern Europe, asking, “Where does the joy come from?” Whether addressing the accusation of a “libelous chain of causation” in medieval legend, a moment in an alley with a Syrian refugee, foxes in the Tiergarten, or a Paris side street where the disciple of a charismatic rabbi celebrates “the graven acts God forbade,” the poems in The Open Hand return us always to earthbound pleasures, stepping toward us to say, after many rehearsals, “stay, enjoy.”