“Through letters, visual art, city documents, and dialogue, Dear Memphis excavates ancestry, inheritance, and the ecological possibility of imagining a future.” — River River Books
"What do I know about exile?" asks the speaker in DEAR MEMPHIS, standing inside the colliding geographies and intimate economies of the American South.
Offering a direct address to the city where the poet grew up, this collection explores the displacement and belonging of a Jewish family in Memphis, Tennessee, alongside their histories of community and environment. The simultaneous richness and spareness of Edelman’s poems sing with their attention to the particular body and what it cannot carry, what it cannot put down. Through letters, visual art, city documents, and dialogue, Dear Memphis excavates ancestry, inheritance, and the ecological possibility of imagining a future.
What folks are saying about Dear Memphis
“Braided within and across the primary subjects of Rachel Edelman’s powerful Dear Memphis—diaspora, racial and social injustice, family, place—is an ongoing meditation on the complexities of memory. On the paradox of memory, which like a road map of a city one no longer lives in, holds absence and presence simultaneously. There, in the re-envisioned past, are the legends and landmarks and intersections of time. Here, through lyrics enriched by Edelman’s vivid imagery and distinctive music, is timelessness. “Beneath what I see is what I know”, she writes. Dear Memphis is testament to the vastness of that knowledge.”
— Linda Bierds, author of The Hardy Tree
“Rachel Edelman’s Dear Memphis is a kind of modern-day Exodus, offering haunting lyric poems that evoke experiences of dispersal and diaspora. A white Jewish woman with deep roots in Memphis, Edelman speaks searingly of ‘what she knows of the South’ and its racial history, one in which she is uneasily embedded. Whether arriving out of personal, biblical, historical, or political stories of migration, Edelman’s poems are piercingly self-aware. This is a work of moving lamentation, undergirded by the poet’s sustained interest in exposing and trying to hold opposing truths: ‘the country where I am/is the country I abandoned.”
— Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone
“In Dear Memphis, Rachel Edelman probes the shifting meaning of the intersection of whiteness and Jewishness in the US South. Refusing the romance of suffering, these poems enter the terrain of ongoing struggle that is history and insist that there is nothing inherently liberatory about having been oppressed. Where white Jewish accumulation takes place alongside entrenched anti-Blackness, what might the intergenerational trauma of antisemitism mean for the possibilities of solidarity? Punctuated with epistolary poems, Edelman’s searching text recalls that to address is to traverse a distance and seek a closeness, that reckoning is a profound intimacy, that to leave is also the condition of return. “Who did I choose / when I wished myself elsewhere?” Edelman asks. Holding to the possibility of transformation in encounter, Dear Memphis shimmers with the difficult work of love.”
— Claire Schwartz, author of Civil Service
From the “Nonfiction for No Reason” event on November 8, curated by Katie Lee Ellison