Winner of the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
The poems in this book deal with life in a Pennsylvania Mennonite community and the tensions and conflicts that exist for the speaker as she tries to be true to two worlds, the other being New York City.
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Kasdorf chronicles her difficult journey from the Mennonite community into which she was born to a secular life in New York City. The material presents an interesting and unusually close portrait of the Amish people-for the most part without sentimentality. . . . Paradoxically, the speaker justifies her new way of life by citing the lessons she learned as a child.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author ofSleeping Preacher, Eve’s Striptease, Poetry in America, and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary project created in collaboration with photographer Steven Rubin. She has also published a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and a biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.