After the Track trilogy, one of the most brilliant and audacious works in recent American literature, what a pleasure to discover these earlier poems by Norman Finkelstein. Lyrical, probing, and always finely wrought, there is a tenderness in this book that can break one’s heart. — Paul Auster

Praise for TRACK

Norman Finkelstein’s Track … is a beautiful, beguiling book of unrest. —Nathaniel Mackey

The cumulative sense and soul of so many passages ventured, so many thresholds crossed, shed a perfect radiance. In Track, the light is solid. —Donald Revell

No contemporary figure’s life project more avidly scours the borders between heaven and earth, doctrine and faith, the metaphysical inside the physical spaces of a Word, than poet/ critic’s Norman Finkelstein. —Claudia Keelan

Author's Note

Passing Over, written in late 80s-early 90s, includes a set of rhapsodic lyrics in the style of Finkelstein's first book, Restless Messengers, and two serial poems, one dealing with the Shoah, the other based on the Passover Haggadah.

About the Author

Norman Finkelstein is a poet and literary critic. His books of poetry include Restless Messengers (Georgia, 1992) and the three volume serial poem Track: Track (Spuyten Duyvil, 1999), Columns (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002), and Powers (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). He has written extensively about modern and postmodern poetry, and about Jewish literature. His books of criticism are The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Literature (Bucknell, 1988, 1993), The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature (SUNY, 1992), Not One of Them In Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (SUNY, 2002) and Lyrical Interference: Essays on Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil, 2004). He is currently writing a study on religious revisionism in contemporary long poems. Finkelstein was born in New York City in 1954. He received his B.A. from Binghamton University and his Ph.D. from Emory University. He is a Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he has taught since 1980.