Praise & Reviews of Ruth’s Poetry
Ruth Sabath Rosenthal’s Facing Home and beyond is bursting with life, teeming with vibrant portraits of grandparent, mother, father, sister, husband, red-clad women — and more. Poems skillfully focus on birth, sex, marriage, aging and death, while others — often done with rich humor — center on food, animals (including parrot and porcupine), dreams, Whitman, Yeats, and more… Here is poetry that throbs with vividly presented human experience.
In Facing Home and beyond, Ruth Sabath Rosenthal reaches back into the past relating important history, while mindful of the significance of the present. Her work covers a multitude of subjects, each given special attention. I hope you will be, as I was, filled and completely satisfied with Ruth’s storm of images.
In Ruth’s poems, life is often a riddle, or at least a source of puzzlement and paradox. Ruth’s keen perceptions help us better comprehend ourselves. We come to see life in a different light — enlightenment that allows us to find and face our own home and go beyond.
Facing Home is no sentimental or nostalgic gesture for Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, but rather a tough-minded encounter with the subtle cruelties, the blind-spots, and the betrayals that all who have marked time within families will recognize. Though disappointment and loss are inherent in the terrain, any collection in which the cassette tape of a last phone message is preserved in a “velvet-lined box” speaks to tenderness as a counterweight to mortality. It’s that ability to balance, on taut lines, juggling a wry (and often pun-loving) wit with moral courage — that makes these poems triumphs of form and candor.
It’s with passion and humor that Ruth Sabath Rosenthal dives into the complexities of family life in her shining chapbook Facing Home. Forthright and fearless, vulnerable and tender, each poem illuminates an emotional moment between human beings. There is purity of purpose and daring here. Rosenthal’s boldness, insight, and lived earned wisdom embrace her readers with every line.
In Facing Home and beyond, Ruth Sabath Rosenthal gives us well-crafted poems, which focus on the family in heightened stages of life. The poems are emotionally charged and complex and, at times, dark. With arresting titles, Ruth vividly presents the human experience with sensibility and humor.
November 26, 2010, Jendi Reiter reviewed chapbook “Facing Home” for Winning Writers
Ruth Sabath Rosenthal’s poetry chapbook “Facing Home” has just been released by Finishing Line Press. As the title suggests, these frank and emotionally charged poems are about facing memories of the home we grew up in, as well as the homes that we as adults have made, broken, and re-formed.
October 4, 2011, Rachel L. Kaminsky reviewed book “Facing Home and beyond” for Bibliotekos
Facing Home and beyond delves deep into the often complicated facets of relationships between husbands and wives, as well as parents and children, which can produce paradoxical experiences of heartache and pleasure. Although Rosenthal’s poems appear highly personal, they also contain universal truths, such as, feelings of pain and nostalgia will often be felt after a loved one is no longer a present figure in one’s life. It is these feelings that anchor her poems into a subject matter that allows for healing and renewal after loss is experienced within relationships.