Saibara
by Tomer Inbar
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Chin Music Press, Inc.
Publication date: March 4, 2025
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1634050754
ISBN-13: 978-1634050753
Saibara, a form of Japanese folk song formalized in the Heian Era, are simple poems of everyday life that were set to music. Courtiers would sing the songs in the Kyoto and Nara regions to entertain the upper class. Tomer Inbar's translations help us see these earthy, often erotic slices of everyday life anew. Born in Jerusalem and raised in Brooklyn, Inbar studied writing at Binghamton University. He received an MA in Classical Japanese Literature from Cornell University and law degrees from New York University. He founded and edited Camellia, an experimental literary journal (1989–97), and his first book of poetry, In the World Enormous, was published by Station Hill Press in 2018. Inbar currently lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and works as an attorney representing charities and other nonprofit organizations.
In the World Enormous
by Tomer Inbar
Paperback: 60 pages
Publisher: Station Hill Press, Inc.
Publication date: October 23, 2018
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1581771738
ISBN-13: 978-1581771732
In the World Enormous is a collection of poems engaged in transition, conversation and what falls between. They focus on a period that begins shortly before the death of Tomer Inbar’s mother and ends after the birth of his twin daughters. In this, the poems constitute a way of thinking out of and about passing and starting again, taking things in their energy, rhythm and moment, including in words with their simultaneously infinite, immediate intimacy and enormity. They have a plangent, even restless, form, with Inbar tellingly indeterminate regarding the direction in which we read and connect and so being open to their engagement from bottom up or top down, moving this way and that, forward and back―though all in one piece. Thought as assemblage seems to sway to subtleties of moment as a momentum that defines a space and way to move through, as presence comes together to inscribe sense, experience or idea. Inbar writes, “These poems like their movement. I like how these poems move. Apart from the definitional, I find comfort in being present as things move. With sibilance. On their own volition. Taking the qualities of their construction along.” More perhaps than this, these poems seem to compel us to think an impossible thought.