Where Lightning Strikes: Poems on the Holocaust

"Where Lightning Strikes" includes all Szeman's Holocaust poetry, from the poems featured in her Ph.D. dissertation "Survivor: One Who Survives, " to the original versions of "Rachel's poems" appearing or mentioned in Szeman's award-winning, critically acclaimed first novel "The Kommandant's Mistress." The poems in this collection revisit the classic themes that have inspired poets for generations: love, passion, betrayal, doubt, loyalty, despair, faith, and survival - this time in the context of the period before, during, and after the Holocaust with its systematic persecution and extermination of the majority of European Jewry by the Nazi regime.

In this collection, victims are given voices. The true story of Auschwitz-survivor Anna Brunn Ornstein, who was in the camp as a young girl with her mother, is transformed from Anna's own stories and related in the disturbing yet moving poem "Sofie and Anna." Other disturbing yet lyrical poems trace the Holocaust from the perpetrators' perspective, from Speer's musings to a Ghetto guard's complaints. Haunting depictions of abusers' and survivors' lives after the war appear, from those who protest innocence, not always convincingly, to those who survived the camps and rebuilt their lives, only to encounter surprising events after the War.

Though the line-breaks are syllabic - imitating the arbitrary rigidity of the Nazi persecutions as well as of the concentration camps' operations - the language flows passionately over the artificially imposed line-breaks and formal stanzas. All of the poems in this collection have been previously published in literary and university journals. Winner of the prestigious Elliston Poetry Prize ('83, 84, '85) and the Isabel & Mary Neff Creative Writing Fellowship ('84-85). Along with her non-Holocaust poetry collection, "Love in the Time of Dinosaurs, " this volume, "Where Lightning Strikes, " was unanimously accepted for publication by all outside readers of UKA Press in 2004.

Szeman's themes, though set, in this collection, around the Holocaust, are universal, encompassing the perpetrators', victims', and survivors' perspectives equally insightfully. As powerful, unsettling, and lyrical as her first novel, "The Kommandant's Mistress, " these poems will take you on a compelling, chilling, and unforgettable journey into the lives, hearts, and minds of all those who were in the Holocaust.