Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) was born in Brooklyn, the son of Russian immigrants. He was an original, a blood-and-bone New Yorker who walked the city's waterfronts and breathed the life of the Jewish tenements into a lifetime of remarkable poetry. Black Sparrow Books is proud to publish his complete shorter poems - all of his poetry except the book-length works Testimony and Holocaust - scrupulously edited, with notes, by Seamus Cooney.


"[Reznikoff's] Jewish street wisdom, his keen eye for the New York City detail, his appetite for the telling narrative arc, all of these gifts are to be treasured. . . He also gives poets an opportunity to write clearly and deeply about what they have seen and experienced by providing models for how to do it in poem after poem."
-Bill Zavatsky, Poetry Foundation