“Early in Jon Sebba’s powerful meditation on the immediate and lasting effects of war, he states that words can ease trauma / make loss bearable / even resurrect the dead // but they can’t stop the slaughter.’  And yet the poet, who fought in the 1967 Six-Day War, persists in poem after explicit poem to prevent us from turning away from war’s horrid truths, yet at the same time he attempts to lift us above our worst selves.  ‘Too late for me,’ he says, ‘still carrying / invisible scars after thirty years.’ These haunting poems render such scars visible.”

 

—Andrea Hollander, author of Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012

 

 

 

“From its very title, Jon Sebba’s affecting collection of poems, is – more even than a series  of meditations on war – a series of tiny elegies, each poem like a zoom lens on yet another incalculable human cost of war and the further consequence of that cost  in the contradictory aftermath of survival.   Though many of the poems are deceptively direct and simple, their substance is surprisingly complex.   As Sebba heart- breakingly states of Israeli pacifist poems in ‘Neve Shalom – Paths of Peace’:  ‘My mind longs/ to follow your pleasant paths but my heart/ my heart rebels, held hostage.’   This is a moving revelation of the bitter human repercussions of living in a moment when cannons drown out pigeons cooing in olive trees.’”

 

—Jacqueline Osherow, author of Whitethorn (Louisiana State University Press), 2011,

 

 

 

“’War is what happens when language fails,’ writes the novelist Margaret Atwood. In Jon Sebba’s collection of poems Yossi, Yasser, & Other Soldiers, poetry is what happens when war imprints itself on a young soldier in the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967.  Conflict and confusion are described with precision, yet the mystery of death is left intact.  The last section of poems spoken in the voices of soldiers in other wars—WWI, WWII, Gallipoli, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and others—rounds out a thematically cohesive collection of poems that makes the depravity of war all too real.”

 

 

—Natasha Saje, the author of three books of poems, including the forthcoming Vivarium.