Having lived part time in Brooklyn for the past several years, Jacob Scheier's new poems are solidly rooted in Jewish New York life and examine love, loss, history, identity, protest, and popular culture. At the heart of Letter from Brooklyn is the notion that people understand who they are by where they have been. Everything is at once political and poetic, inseparable from intimate experience and personal heartbreak. Scheier moves from the inner worlds of grief and love to form a poetic dialectic between the familial and the historical. Whether eating in a knish restaurant on the Lower East Side or falling in and then out of love with the Brooklyn Bridge, or even being startled while biking down a prairie road, with depth and originality Scheier confronts the question of where home is and what it means amid private and public loss.
