Praise for Tablet Fragments
“Tablet Fragments is an immense pleasure to read. Rubin’s writing is so deeply thoughtful and intimate, she seems to always find the right notes of connection in those soft, quiet moments. Rubin’s gift as a poet is in inscribing lines that both create fractures, and connect them, much like the tablet fragments that centre the book.”
–Jordan Abel, author of The Place of Scraps, Un/inhabited, and Injun, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, PhD
“Tamar Rubin’s Tablet Fragments offers poems quietly burning with a rare fire. Just like the line from a poem about a domestic argument, ‘We are both full of fire, and the injury / that fuels it,’ Rubin’s singed relational poems – about love, family, religious heritage, and medical encounters – come alive because of the self-awareness on offer in the work. Rubin’s poetic is aware it consumes as much as it illuminates, making this an unusually wise first book.”
–Shane Neilson, poet, physician, critic, FA, MA, PhD, CCFP, FCFP
“I look forward to seeing what comes next for Rubin. Tablet Fragments is a remarkable beginning.”
–Robert Colman, Poet and Editor
“In her debut collection, Tablet Fragments, poet Tamar Rubin writes as a diagnostic eyewitness on the complexities of her life. She is a daughter and a granddaughter, a wife, and a mother. She is also a physician with an intimate knowledge of the body’s own ‘fragments,’ with their capacity to break down and then recover. It is this miracle of resilience that Rubin probes in poems that move through brokenness toward healing as they trace the nuances of cultural identify and personal history, family relationships and meaningful work.”
-Ruth Panofsky, author of Radiant Shards: Hoda’s North End Poems, PhD, FRSC
