Neither Wit Nor Gold

Poetry. While putting together a manuscript of work written between 1975-1990, Alcalay became dissatisfied with the notion of a "selected poems." As a response, he began to comb through photographs, correspondence, memorabilia, journal entries, and newspaper clippings from the era, and incorporated them into his book; the result is a personal investigation into the relationships of context to text, memory to nostalgia, and present attention to the multiple traces of the past. "Ammiel Alcalay is that rare thing - a gifted prose writer and poet, an accomplished intellectual and a true, as well as inventive, comparatist" - Edward Said.