Swan, What Shores?

At the turn of the century, American Jews and prohibitionists viewed one another with growing suspicion. Jews believed that all Americans had the right to sell and consume alcohol, while prohibitionists insisted that alcohol commerce and consumption posed a threat to the nations morality and security. The two groups possessed incompatible visions of what it meant to be a productive and patriotic American--and in 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution made alcohol commerce illegal, Jews discovered that anti-Semitic sentiments had mixed with anti-alcohol ideology, threatening their reputation and their standing in American society.  

In Jews and Booze, Marni Davis examines American Jews long and complicated relationship to alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movements rise and fall. Bringing to bear an extensive range of archival materials, Davis offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity--the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer--and reveals that alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibitions triumph cast a pall on American Jews history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities, both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.  

The winner of the NYU Press Prize for Poetry this alluring collection marks the blossoming of a major poetic talent.

Winner of the Colorado Book Award;

Winner of the Willa Literary Award

As heard on Public Radio International's The Writer's Almanac!

Full of music and evocative word play, Veronica Patterson's Swan, What Shores? offers alluring poems varied in form and inventive in approach. In language that is both precise and lyrical, Patterson's work, like much of the best poetry, plumbs the human condition with depth, wit, and, above all, compassion.

The poems offer fine surprises, from the lyrical litany of "The Riddle of My Want" ("the stride of your eyes / a summering of skin") to the unusual elegy "Three Photographs Not of My Father" to the mysteries embodied in "Where Are My Swans?": "All movement in their dreams is theirs / that glide-without-haste, for what core of the universe / has to hurry?"

Swan, What Shores? marks the blossoming of a major poetic talent.

The author of one previous collection of poetry How to Make a Terrarium, VERONICA PATTERSON grew up in Ithaca, New York, and graduated from Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Northern Colorado. Her work has appeared in the Southern Poetry Review, the Colorado Review, the Bloomsbury Review, Caliban, The Sun, and numerous other magazines and journals. She lives in Loveland, CO.