Tsim Tsum

By: Sabrina Orah Mark

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Synopsis: Sabrina Orah Mark follows up her critically acclaimed debut, The Babies, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize in 2004 chosen by Jane Miller, with a second collection of prose, Tsim Tsum, centered on two characters, Walter B. and Beatrice, first introduced in The Babies. Unbeknownst to them they have come into being under the laws of Tsim Tsum, a Kabbalistic claim that a being cannot become, or come into existence, unless the creator of that being departs from that being. Along their journey they encounter many beguiling characters including The Healer, The Collector, Walter B.'s Extraordinary Cousin, and the Oldest Animal. These figures bewilder and dislodge what is at the heart of the immigrant experience: survival, testimony, and belonging. "Sabrina Orah Mark's Tsim Tsum is like a collection of episodes from a lost, slightly sinister children's book on the nature of love and time, in which wry parables move us further and further down unknown hallways, beyond instruction, into corridors of dream-sense, far into the strange, cool territory of the fabulous."--Mark Doty "You'll remember what Mark has done with the prose poem: you'll wonder how on Earth she does it, too."--Stephen Burt