“(A) powerful new volume of poetry . . . that exquisitely addresses the nuances of survival, adaptation and exile.”—The Jewish Daily Forward
“Jehanne Dubrow in her fifth book of poems tells us a story so compelling that we put down our tasks and turn to her voice.”—Hilda Raz, author of All Odd and Splendid
“Bold writing with visionary power and strong language. . . . I couldn’t stop reading it.”—Washington Independent Review of Books
“We witness in these pages raw violence of marriages arranged, marriages broken. We feel the knife blade, recognize as our own every wounded body.”—Peggy Shumaker, author of Gnawed Bones
“Using prose blocks, Dubrow employs poetic phrasing and distillation as well as the freedom of traditional narrative to interpret her mother’s life, but the striking work resonates far beyond the specifics of her project, extending into the common experiences of fear and trauma.”—Pasatiempo
“Call it the speculative, or the subjunctive, or the surreal. You’ll call it stunning and surprising, too. Dubrow has transformed language into paint, film, and shutter. She has stretched back in time to the beginning before the beginning, out in range to the landscape beyond the frame. Her book is a map. Her atlas is a canvas. Her history is a photograph. Put another way, her project is part genealogy, part inheritance, and all art of the highest order.”
—The Rumpus
“Here is a sequence of nuanced narratives, each anxiously circling arrangements of marriage, violence, and the shadows of history. Jehanne Dubrow has a storyteller’s gift for suggesting, with enviable economy of language, the complexities of our relationships with those we love and the inescapable past that surrounds us. Elegant, intimate, and unsettling, The Arranged Marriage is a terrific—an important—book.”—Kevin Prufer, author of In a Beautiful Country
“ The Arranged Marriage brims with gorgeous wants: some of them dark and some ‘the pink of bougainvillea.’ In her newest collection Jehanne Dubrow writes of the dark bonds that tie women—‘so easily torn, so devoted to ornament’—to the complicated institution that is marriage in lyric portraits that uncover, unstitch, and unearth the secret entanglements at the heart of these intricate unions.”—Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Milk and Filth
