Words on the Street

$19.95

by Anna Rabinowitz

Words on the Street is set in the center of a mystery. An infant is abducted and seven symbolic figures play their metaphoric fiddles while humanity is plagued by chronic threat, insecurity, and confusion. This is not a book for the faint of heart. It is to be read at the peril of complacency. It situates the reader in a landscape choked with graffiti, teeming with hearsay and falsehood. Human existence roils with questions about artifice and reality; the absurd and the comic; good and evil; the knowable and the unknowable. Above all, the words on the street, namely Anna Rabinowitz’s words, pave the street we all inhabit, speaking from the primal core of the human predicament: the conundrum between two whys.

by Anna Rabinowitz

Words on the Street is set in the center of a mystery. An infant is abducted and seven symbolic figures play their metaphoric fiddles while humanity is plagued by chronic threat, insecurity, and confusion. This is not a book for the faint of heart. It is to be read at the peril of complacency. It situates the reader in a landscape choked with graffiti, teeming with hearsay and falsehood. Human existence roils with questions about artifice and reality; the absurd and the comic; good and evil; the knowable and the unknowable. Above all, the words on the street, namely Anna Rabinowitz’s words, pave the street we all inhabit, speaking from the primal core of the human predicament: the conundrum between two whys.

Buy Now


Winner, 2017 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize

About the Author

A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Anna Rabinowitz has published five volumes of poetry: Words on the Street, Present Tense, The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders, Darkling: A Poem, and At the Site of Inside Out.

She has written the librettos for The Wanton Sublime, a monodrama with original music by Tarik O’Regan, and Darkling, a multi-media opera with music by Stefan Weisman. Darkling excerpts have been performed in many venues, and a full-length production ran for three weeks Off-Broadway. A semi-staged concert version traveled to Europe. Darkling’s latest incarnations are a CD from Albany Records, and a bi-lingual German-English translation from Luxbooks, Weisbaden, Germany.

She has published widely in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, and Verse. Her poetry has appeared in the anthologies, The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, The KGB Bar Reader, The Poets’ Grimm, Poetry Daily, Poetry After 9/11, Blood to Remember, Women Poets on Mentorship, and Aftershocks: The Poetry of Recovery.

Advanced Praise

“A Juniper Prize–winning poet (At the Site of Inside Out) and a librettist—The Wanton Sublime is a chamber opera and monodrama for mezzo-soprano—Rabinowitz offers poetry as story as near drama. The setting is a time of ‘worn-thin profits’ when ‘children, like troublesome details, were marooned/ within gaps of being with nowhere to turn,’ the heroine is a baby endangered by several mysterious figures, and the tone is energized Occupy Wall Street surreal. Rabinowitz scatters lines across the ever-turning pages and dares you to follow. VERDICT For all rebels at heart.” — Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Recent political events resonate through these pages even though the pages were printed before the events. This is how the literary operates its uncanny presence. The tension of past tense versus future readings sometimes astonishes, sometimes consoles. I do not know what consolation is available here beyond that which always accompanies the display of dexterity, intelligence, wit, and wisdom.” — Bin Ramke, The Denver Quarterly

“Anna Rabinowitz at her highest, boldest register.” — Timothy Donnelly

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-80-6