Holocaust-inspired poet to give reading

Sommer

Jason Sommer, prize-winning poet and author, will kick off this semester's Hyam Plutzik Memorial Poetry Series with a reading at noon on Friday, February 12, in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library.

Sommer, the son of a Holocaust survivor, evokes historical and familial experiences of pain and survival during and after World War II. The title of his new book and his second collection of poems, Other People's Troubles, refers to a Jewish parable where souls leave their troubles in a "waiting room" while being interviewed. The soul leaves surrounded by other people's troubles, and so better able to bear its own.

In his poems, Sommer crafts moving phrases and images in telling stories of suffering and cruelty. The death of a village idiot ("in 1940 they practiced Holocaust/on his sort just to get the knack") is foreshadowed by the taunts of children because, "before the astounding/cruelties are the ordinary ones."

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anthony Hecht commented that "these poems are brave, deeply moving, and ineradicable. . . . They are a quiet, devoted memorial to unspeakable tragedy."

Sommer is an associate professor, writer-in-residence, and director of the Honors Program at Fontbonne College in St. Louis.