In To Measure the World, Karen Shenfeld confronts the chimerical nature of love — erotic, domestic, familial — and its power to sustain and harm. With a language that’s immediate, transcendent, and visual, the poet celebrates conjugal love, then strips bare the self when she’s blindsided by its dissolution. She pays tribute to friends and family; she explores her evolving relationship with her mother, bearing witness to the debilitation of aging and disease with wit and compassion. Here, too, Shenfeld ventures away from the home into the world: She follows the footsteps of Keats and Tennyson to England’s Isle of Wight where she conjures a fragile landscape, “mutable as marriage,” “slip-sliding to the knowing sea.”

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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The poems in Karen Shenfeld’s fourth collection, To Measure the World, speak to the deep sources — ancient landscapes, searing interiors, biblical motives, laws of return. There are pledges, curses, betrayals, admonishments, unholy thoughts and acts; reckoning and measuring “what remains” — always with fealty to language and classic craft. These are poems for keeping the faith, for navigating beauty in worlds of “shifting shoals” and “fallen hearts.” ~ Elana Wolff, author of Swoon