
by Eric Gudas
NAOMI REPLANSKY’S POEMS have unsettled, obsessed, and captivated me since I first encountered them, as a 20-year-old college student, at a reading in the West Village. That night Replansky, then in her mid-70s, stood before an audience at Judith’s Room, a now defunct bookstore, and recited from memory — in a voice that bore traces of her childhood “in the dream-tossed Bronx” — poems peopled by exiles, refugees, prisoners, outcasts, the unquiet dead, outlaws, and poets at daggers drawn with the Muse. Replansky prefaced her reading by quoting from William Blake’s “Infant Sorrow”: “My mother groan’d! my father wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt.”
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