Karen Shenfeld's careful, concentrated language draws the reader in. Hers is a charged, physical world where figure skates are “a shock of alpine white,” and the Torah's “crowned letters dance.” It is also a world marked by profound metaphysical connections where fireflies flash “coded signals of their secret selves.” There is an irresistible brilliance and humour to several of the poems and Shenfeld's tributes to her redhot Jewish mamas - Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, and Sophie Tucker - will leave the lover of poetry wishing she—d offered more. - Kenneth Sherman

Karen Shenfeld has published three books with Guernica Editions: The Law Of Return (1999), which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry in 2001, The Fertile Crescent (2005), and My Father's Hands Spoke in Yiddish (2010). Her poetry has also appeared in well-known journals and anthologies published in Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Bangladesh. It has been featured on Canada’s CBC Radio and CKLN, and on 39 Dover Street, a short-wave radio programme produced on the Isle of Wight, England. She has been awarded Canada, Ontario and Toronto Arts Council Grants. In March of 2010, she travelled to Linares, Mexico to participate in the first Festival Internacional de Literatura. Shenfeld has also brought her poetic sensibility to the writing of feature magazine stories, for publications such as Saturday Night and The Idler, and to documentary filmmaking. Her personal documentary, Il Giardino, The Gardens of Little Italy, was screened at the 2007 Planet in Focus Environmental Film & Video Festival. Shenfeld lives in the heart of Toronto’s Little Italy. In the writing of My Father’s Hands Spoke in Yiddish, the poet flies home from far-flung lands to explore the re-imagined terrain of Bathurst Manor, the Toronto suburb in which she was raised.

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"My Father's Hands Spoke in Yiddish is a powerful collection. Karen Shenfeld's poems are filled with passionate sensuality, triggered by dazzling memories of people and places. There are short lyric poems that focus on a specific symbol to take on larger meanings, and narrative works in which the poet contemplates the Holocaust using the specifics of everyday, named objects. From Shenfeld's controlled intelligence comes an honest recollection of the past, imbued with an expansive hopefulness. - Michael Carrino"