Israel In Translation

Today, host Marcela Sulak reads the work of Tel Aviv-based poet Tahel Frosh. Her debut poetry collection, from which these poems have been chosen, was published in 2014. Translator Adriana Jacobs calls it one of the most urgent and political books of poetry published in recent years. Here is an excerpt from "The Mountains of Spain": "All of this is so impossible that it holds back thoughts of love and lust and my will to breathe the air after rain so much that I’ll lose myself in a book called Cocaine Nights and get mad when I read about people with money, so much money that they retire to the mountains of Spain and sunbathe in fancy villas at the age of thirty-eight." Frosh’s stunningly crafted poems, which include a number of prose poems, offer a critique of Israel’s free-market economy, the housing crisis, and globalization through the perspective of Israel’s working class. She has degrees in law and psychology, and is currently working on a doctorate in literature. She co-edited the anthology Avodat Gil