City of Skypapers [Paperback]

A poignant collection of poems exploring the intersection of personal and national identity in contemporary Israel.

City of Skypaperscaptures the essence of life in Tel Aviv, blending the mundane with the sacred and reflecting on the complexities of living in a politically charged environment. Marcela Sulak's poems delve into the everyday moments of single motherhood, the rhythms of the Jewish calendar, and the landscapes of Israel, offering a unique perspective on modern Jewish life.

Through vivid imagery and self-deprecating humor, Sulak examines what it means to get here today, inviting readers to contemplate their own journeys and connections to place and identity. This collection is for those who appreciate contemporary poetry that engages with cultural and social issues in a personal and meaningful way.

“What’s it like to be Marcela Sulak in her City of Sky? What do her papers reveal? They show an irony, a tenderness, a way of reaching for others, for her daughter, for her sunlit, conflicted, demanding Israeli landscape, from ‘pomegranate season’ into the heavens beyond the wars. They are populous papers, generous poems: they celebrate ‘stars, not planes,’ and they lift up real people, famous, semi-famous and known only to themselves. They leap from jackals to jealousy, from voting booths to veils over Heaven, worldwide nets of friends and long-lined reachings-out to single sentences of loneliness. They record the holy, the everyday, the errors and the rightness in ‘other people’s scripts;’ they have the rightness of journalism and the rightness of visions. They tolerate and sometimes love their Jerusalem, ‘full of inadvisable faith,’ even as they reach out to Tel Aviv in sonnets, to America in letters, to Gaza, to the clouds. They can help, now. And there is nothing much like them.” —Stephanie Burt ’I’ve grown/ very strolÓÞ