Between Sanctity and Sand

<p>A quietude lives in Between Sanctity and Sand-through Yael Shoshana Hacohen's strong voice.</p><p> -Yusef Komunyakaa</p><p><br></p><p>An heir to Yehuda Amichai Yael Hacohen is a young poet with an old soul and her harrowing war-torn lyrics bring something utterly fresh into American poetry-a shocked memory of military life a desert consciousness that hovers between the sacred and the profane and an awe-inspiring sense of poetry that is both ancient and new. This short book is a gem.</p><p> -Edward Hirsch</p><p><br></p><p>What a revelatory and painful pleasure it is to read the fierce lyrics in Yael Hacohen's Between Sanctity and Sand; this formidable debut packs a punch conjuring the terrors of war while retaining the tender humanity and intimacies of song.</p><p> -Deborah Landau</p><p><br></p><p>Yael S. Hacohen's poems conjure with vivid soul-piercing immediacy the view from behind a soldier's eyes drawing on her experience as a commander in the Israeli military. In one poem a young trainee feels the first awesome thrill of a weapon in her hand: I could shoot like an angel./ I could hit a running target/ at six-hundred-fifty meters. Terrifying moments are rendered as if in time-lapse photography: After he shoots you want to shoot back but you didn't/ put in the time. And now you can't get your breathing straight. The speaker of one of these poems even grieves her enemy: Little boy what could lead you to strap a bomb to your chest? Hacohen neither shrinks from nor condemns war; she seek to comprehend it to acknowledge its persistence. Listen even the olive tree/ needs to be beaten with a stick she advises which is perhaps to say you can love your enemy and still not have peace.</p><p> -Craig Morgan Teicher</p><p><br></p>