whenever I cookedblack beans mydad would smilethat Al Statman smileit split hisface in two (always)he’d say what your auntscalled schwarze bupkesmis tias and theirCuban Yiddish theirCuban Jewish cookingall it means isblack beansbut it made my dadso happy to sayhe’d laughschwarze bupkesschwarze bupkesschwarze bupkes
schwarze bupkes
Mark Statman
Feature Date
- August 3, 2023
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“schwarze bupkes” from HECHIZO: by Mark Statman.
Copyright © 2022 by Mark Statman.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Mark Statman has written eleven books. Among them are the poetry collections Hechizo (Lavender Ink, 2022), Exile Home (Lavender Ink, 2019), That Train Again (Lavender Ink, 2015), A Map of the Winds (Lavender Ink, 2013) and Tourist at a Miracle (Hanging Loose, 2010). His translations include Never Made in America: Selected Poetry from Martín Barea Mattos (Lavender Ink/diálogos, 2017), Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa (University of New Orleans Press, 2012), and, with Pablo Medina, a translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (Grove, 2008). Statman’s poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in 23 anthologies, as well as such publications as New American Writing, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, Hanging Loose, Ping Pong, Xavier Review, and American Poetry Review. A recipient of awards from the NEA and the National Writers Project, he is Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, and lives in San Pedro Ixtlahuaca and Oaxaca de Juárez, MX.
An hechizo is a spell, an incantation that attempts to effect change in the world via language. Mark Statman’s Hechizo is woven through a world of personal demons, past and present, a world facing a pandemic and social, political, and environmental dissolution. These incantations take aim at the world from the smallest lizard that crawls into view to overarching political structures. It’s a register not seen in his work before—of foreboding, the forbidden, concluding in tentative, possible joy.
"The spell of Mark Statman’s magical, marvelously absorbing Hechizo begins with Furies and ends in Love. The poems’ casual yet perfectly poised short lines engender a sense of unbreakable continuity, until there’s 'nothing/left but ash and/unmoving angelic their/feathered wings' as they bring all opposites together 'when change/and the same are/the same.' They are an endless source of delight."
—John Koethe
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