Nautilus Book Award gold winner in poetry (2023)
National Indie Excellence Award finalist
There Are Still Woods, by Hila Ratzabi (June Road Press, 9/6/22)
Praise for There Are Still Woods
“A marvelous rendering of a world that is both known and incomprehensible. . . . Ratzabi offers her readers an ambitious yet intimate vision, threaded by faith, nature, art, and family [that] requires us to hold the earth and our mortality in a vulnerable reckoning, insisting that our lives are inseparable from a greater force, which might be love.”
—Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Seeing the Body
“Hila Ratzabi’s beautiful collection walks us through the hurricanes and melting ice caps of our late anthropocene. . . . Her poems ache with environmental grief, with apostrophes of arctic ice, with the joy of loving even in a burning world.”
—Traci Brimhall, author of Our Lady of the Ruins
“Hila Ratzabi’s lyrics revitalize myth through an uncannily prescient subjectivity, a rare sense of the planet’s aliveness. Her poetry is embodied, never pretentious, and imbued with great dignity and sometimes amazing insight. Her voice, likewise, is charismatic, challenging, yet infinitely relatable. Such a gifted poet.”
—Ariana Reines, author of A Sand Book
The Apparatus of Visible Things. Poetry chapbook by Hila Ratzabi. Finishing Line Press, 2009.
Praise for The Apparatus of Visible Things
“Hila Ratzabi’s poems are pleasurable because they are so finely balanced. They are wonderful because of what they balance so finely—a concrete, expressive love for the sensuous details of the world with an equally evolved, equally startling capacity for rumination, abstraction, and metaphysical grandeur.”
—Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of 3 Sections
“Hila Ratzabi reminds us that Pessoa, like Wittgenstein, is one of the many who suggested the radical optical world when introspection seemed doomed. But her own poetry meets the data that perception and consciousness are twins and married and embrace: think, look. Her world contains babies, boys, air conditioners, and desks, but it is also a notebook of unanswerable questions. Out of these carnal doubts she makes a faithful late language … Hila turns her painterly poems into a mountain, into mounds of ideas.”
—David Shapiro, author of In Memory of an Angel
“I have read (and reread) these craft-wise poems. They are simultaneously strangely imaged—extraordinarily so—while accessible and wonderfully lyric. Even more important are the questions this poet asks of us: relentless, but mostly heavenly, fearful, and hope-filled.”
—Kate Knapp Johnson, author of Wind Somewhere, and Shade
Poem Publications
“We See You: For Ukraine,” Ritualwell.org, February 2022
“Elul,” “These Fires,” American Religion Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 2021, pp. 106-109
“Prayer Before Turning on the News,” Narrative Magazine, Spring 2020
“Prayer for Solomon Teka,” Poets Resist series, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, July 11, 2019
“And There Was Morning: A Prayer for New Zealand,” Ritualwell.org, 2019
“How To Pray While the World Burns,” Ritualwell.org, Oct. 28, 2018
“November 9, 2016,” About Place
“The Names of God,” Foundry, Issue 3, March 2017
“Imaginary Arctic,” “But now the stark dignity of entrance,” Glass: A Journal of Poetry
“Willapa Bay,” “Nocturne,”The Adroit Journal
“Picnic on the Moon,” Queen’s Mob Teahouse
“Diary of Sila the Sky God,” Tinderbox Poetry Journal
“Goat,” Tahoma Literary Review
“Visitation [The first time it happened],” LEVELER
“Sensible Elements,” “Visitation [Sometimes I ignore them],” Life & Legends, third edition, June 2015
“Visitation [The spirits line up],” The Boiler Journal, Summer 2015
“Hawk,” “Escape from the Crocodile Farm,” “Burning the Squirrels,” Verse-Virtual, May 2015
“The Attainable Border of Birds,” “The Path to the Bench in Snow,” Verse-Virtual, June 2015
“Gould Hill Road,” The Nervous Breakdown, March 19, 2015
“Letter from the North,” Linebreak, Jan. 13, 2015
“Omnipresence is an Evolutionary Talent,” “End of the Anthropocene,” Anthropoid, issue 1
“The Benefits of Global Warming,” Dark Mountain, issue 6
“Of the veritable ocean,” “Google Earth,” About Place, 3.1
“Crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge the Day Before the End of the World,”Drunken Boat 18
“Sedna in Space,”Narrative Magazine
“Sedna’s Lecture to the Fish,” “Sedna in Texas,” Apiary Magazine
“Sedna the Arctic Sea Goddess,” Alaska Quarterly Review
“Ancient Human-Bone Sculptors Turned Relatives Into Tools,” “Flooded Man,” The Normal School
“No One Blue” (excerpt), Bone Bouquet
Three poems, Box of Jars
“Portrait and a Dream,”H_NGM_N
Three poems,Mead Magazine
“Aubade,”Cortland Review
“Horatio Street,” Coal Hill Review (nominated for Pushcart Prize)
“Sound Alone,” Southern Poetry Review
“Ways of Leaving,” Margie (finalist for Editors’ Prize)
“To Pray,” Mima’amakim
“The Hasidim,” Zeek
“After Sepia Photographs,” Zeek
“Playing Eve,” Zeek
Anthologized Work & Reprints
“To Pray,” Siddur Lev Shalem for Weekdays (Rabbinical Assembly, forthcoming)
“Diary of Sila the Sky God,” Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, edited by Melissa Tuckey, foreword by Camille Dungy (University of Georgia Press, 2018)
Circe’s Lament: Anthology of Wild Women Poetry, edited by Bianca Lynne Spriggs and Katerina Stoykova-Klemer (Accents Publishing, 2016)
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)