Rumpelstiltskin, or What's in a Name? paper $14
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—Finalist for the Dana Award

—"Magic!" —Kit Duane

With abundant detail and in many voices the poet rounds out family history with sweetness, humor and presence, requently moving back and forth from one era to another. In this way we see the family lines as they gather along the Eel, and disperse. . . . Zara Raab has long entranced us with glimpses into her ancestral life. Now we have the wonder of it in Swimming the Eel. We are grateful.

—Cleo Griffith, editor, Song of the San Joaquin

Swimming the Eel is a moving and impressive work of art. Its family history feels both intimate and mythic in its fresh iteration of a Western American archetype. [With] a combination of formal coherence and musical fluency, . . . a beautifully sustained sequence of poems.

—Stephen Kessler, author, The Tolstoy of the Zulus

This poetic chronology grips and blesses in a way that no history could, telling the story of the American West through family eyes, beginning with an “artless girl who kept a clean house over a green hill,” who is swept toward her future by life’s inevitable “waterfall of loss.” Charm and efficacy yield a light touch; yet the words speak of deep longing. . . amid the “pantaloons of soil along the river rock."

—Cathy Luchetti, author of Women of the West

Who’ll join me. . . as the winter seance starts, wind rattling the pots? Zara Raab’s compelling dream of history, and the painful waking from it, merges inner life with outer world in these exhilarating lyrics of lost lifetimes in an outback corner of Northern California. A brew of wildness and domesticity. . . its pleasures are many. . .

—Beverly Burch, author of Sweet to Burn

These beautiful, unsettling poems proceed with dreamlike assurance through a landscape fully-imagined and brilliantly described. In Raab's transformative retelling of the folk tale, the northern forest itself joins Gretel as a central character: it is a dripping, fog-bound wilderness, a place where "the promises of rain are kept" and homelessness becomes a metaphor for our abiding state of being.

—Jean Nordhaus, Innocence; The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn

The Book of Gretel gleams like a coal in a dark forest, a poetic story of loss, death and despair, and being found. It exists in those dream fragments that must have preceded the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. It is personal. It is lovely, exotic, set in the northern coast of California among the redwoods and the rain.

—James M LeCuyer. Teacher, fisherman, and poet

This new embodiment of Gretel may transport her tale and its characters to the woods of the northern California coast, but it is as wild and weird and haunting as the original. In Zara Raab's strong hands, this becomes a story of identity, of being forsaken and being found, of learning to live as an outcast while not abandoning the possibility of returning home. The Book of Gretel is a stirring poetic series and an impressive first collection.

—Michael McFee, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
Vanishing Acts & Shinemaster