POET CAROL RUBENSTEIN, VANISHED NUMBER

My old friend, the poet Carol Rubenstein, has published 4 new poems on Jerome Rothenberg’s site Poems and Poetics. Rubenstein’s work is dense and associative, with a profusion of images, but always driven by a single concern. In this case it is Auschwitz, which she visited several times over the course of a single year. I first met Carol in 1991, at an open mike reading in Ithaca. The poem she read was easily the best one that night, and it was indeed about Auschwitz. Carol is an inspiration, a true artist who wears her dedication lightly. She lived in Sarawak for years, translating Dayak poetry, which she published in two volumes (which brought her to Cornell, where the John M. Echols Southeast Asia collection resides), The Honey Tree Song and Nightbird Sings.