With clarity and compassion, Murray Riess, painstakingly lays out the fabric of his pain, alienation and redemption as the son of a holocaust survivor. Courageously unsentimental these poems bear the weight of years in their craft and in their telling-- poignant, dark yet whimsical, in their understanding of generational suffering. Riess's poems are deeply reflective of his relationship with his father, a child of the holocaust who lost all his living relatives and was obsessed by guilt that he alone survived. In what seems ultimately to be an impossible task- that of the second generation to apprehend, articulate, and understand a parents' Holocaust traumas, Reiss gives us a harrowing and ultimately triumphant book that will stay with readers long after they close its covers. Remarkably, these powerful and fearless poems map the painfully silent terrain of memory and loss and we the readers are richer for the journey.

Murray Reiss is a B.C. poet whose work is included in anthologies such as Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry (Mother Tongue Publishing) and in periodicals including: Grain, Alaska Quarterly Review, Contemporary Verse 2 and Tickle Ace. In 2005 Mother Tongue Press published his chap book, Distance from the Locus. Reiss was born in Sarnia, Ontario and lives on Salt Spring Island.

Murray Riess' profile page

• Short-listed, Saskatchewan Books Awards: Ministry of Parks, Culture and Sport Publishing Award
• Short-listed, Gerald Lampert Award

"Reiss deftly treads the swamp of the anecdotal and the lyrical, creating poems that step in both, using one to enhance the other." Shane Neilson