When Creation Falls

I’m delighted to announce that my poetry collection When Creation Falls is now available. I’m so pleased to be able to share it with you, and I think you’ll agree with me that Meadowlark Books did an amazing job with the design.

This collection is both deeply personal (beginning with my childhood in Kansas) and political (because there’s no way to disentangle the personal from the political). It arises from my fury at the injustices and horror in the world, but does not, I hope, give into cynicism or despair.

Here’s what the poet Eric McHenry had to say about it:

Izzy Wasserstein is broadly and deeply learned, but also committed to the clear utterance. The poems in When Creation Falls are as transparent as glass—not a window, but a corrective lens, restoring detail and dignity to world of distortions and cynical simplifications. This is a poet furious at injustice but suspicious of fury. I kept thinking, as I read, of Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’—‘All I have is a voice/ To undo the folded lie’ —and it was satisfying to discover that poem’s last line in one of this book’s last poems: ‘Show an affirming flame.’ Auden, of course, infamously renounced the poem, and Wasserstein acknowledges that fraught history in order to craft a durable new affirmation for her-self: ‘And if my words/ become ugly, if I recant/ every last kind thought,/ if the lines of my face/ twist in cruelty,/ may these soundings/ outlast me.’ In a poem addressed ‘To the Child I Will Never Have,’ her final piece of advice is ‘Make something beautiful.’ Someone must have told her the same thing.

When Creation Falls is available through Meadowlark Books, Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore. If you’d prefer a personalized copy, and don’t mind that I’m not Amazon Prime and have to charge for shipping, reach out to me through my contact page.