Black Bread: Poems, After the Holocaust

In her first volume of poetry. She imbues everyday ordinariness-the teacher riding in a student's German car, a friend's migraine, a son's ski trip-with terrifying memories. Yet as she struggles to understand horrors that she has not personally experienced, her melodramatic first-person narratives too often deny the identities and emotions of the people for whom she speaks. In her preface, Greenberg advises readers to read only a few poems at a sitting lest they succumb to "unbridled morbidity"; naive monotony is the more likely outcome. The finest quality of these works is their accessibility, making them more suited to general readers than such brilliantly crafted poetic explorations of the Holocaust as Charles Reznikoff's Testimony - From Library Journal