Wherever We Float, That’s Home

In the tradition of magical realism and with the age old appeal of a Quest, Wherever We Float, That’s Home is infused with myth, fable and family legend. Maya Tevet Dayan’s poems transport the reader to a world where past, present and future all want a seat at the table. The speaker is a wife and mother, but also a nomad and a wanderer, continually searching for her place in the world. Accompanying her on this journey are generations of women: grandmothers, daughters and her own mother, who died from cancer. They advise, admonish and applaud her. They hand down wisdom, then suggest that the speaker might want to wash the floor. In language that is deceptively simple, Tevet Dayan traverses the seen and the unseen with equal dexterity. She reminds us that the universe is perched precariously, there are unequal measures of light and dark, but that we ourselves can remain ＂ immaculate and wondering.＂

Maya Tevet Dayan is the author of a novel (One Thousand Years To Wait - 2011) and three books of poetry: Let There Be Evening. Let There Be Chaos (2015), Wherever We Float, That’s Home (2018) and Coping Mechanisms (2021). Tevet Dayan is the recipient of the Israeli Prime Minister award for literature for 2018 and an honorable mention the Kugel Poetry Prize for 2016. Her latest book, ＂ Feminism, as I Told it to My Daughters＂ (2023) is a memoir in essays based on her columns published in ＂ Haaretz＂ magazine. Her forthcoming book is a translation into Hebrew of the American poet Dorianne Laux. Jane Medved is the author of Wayfarers (winner of the Off The Grid Prize 2024) and Deep Calls To Deep (New Rivers Press 2017) Recent work has appeared in Bending Genres, Ruminate, The North American Review, and the anthologies: Ache: The Body’s Experience Of Religion (Flipped Mitten Press) and Contemporary Jewish Poetry (Laurel Review) Other awards include winner of the 2021 RHINO translation prize and the 2021 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. She is the poetry editor of The Ilanot Review, and a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv.