Working from a rich personal archive of letters, journals, and poems Bachman carries us into the questing journey of being a poet and a woman; what she calls, “A slender proposition that supports a glittering weight.”  This is a memoir as only a true poet can write, life reassembled and revisited in the light of old knowledge, and new.  From her roots in the Jewish community of Albany New York, to 1970’s feminist houses in the Boston area, from her studies in Jerusalem to her studies with Adrienne Rich at Brandeis University, to a dozen places in between, the work is a cultural mirror of the lived experience of women poets in the last 40 years. Bachman writes with unfailing wit and warmth, interrogating her freedom, travel and the story-without-boundaries that is poetry itself. 
 
BIO
 
Merle Lyn Bachman is the granddaughter of a numbers runner, an opera buff, a tailor forced to raise chickens and a woman whose heart was so big, it failed too soon: in other words, ordinary Jews who immigrated to the U.S. (New York) from Russia and Poland in the early 20th century.
 
During some of her own migrations, she has published the following poetry chapbooks and books: The Opposite of Vanishing (EtherDome), Wrecker’s Ball (Finishing Line), Diorama with Fleeing Figures (Shearsman), Blood Party (Shearsman) along with Nameless Country, an anthology of poetry by A. C. Jacobs, co-edited with Anthony Rudolf  (Carcanet), and Recovering Yiddishland (Syracuse University), a book of literary criticism and translation. In 2015-16 she was a Translation Fellow of the Yiddish Book Center and is currently developing a manuscript of selected poems by Rosa Nevadovska, in translation.