he swam way out past the shadows cast / by the steel towers of the indifferent gray bridge / shielding the traffic flowing rhythmically back and / forth, far above the little dead lighthouse that stopped working long / ago when there was nothing left down there / that anyone still wanted to see.
Pinny Bulman's poems chronicle his coming of age as a young religious Jewish man against the backdrop of the Dominican and Puerto Rican culture in Washington Heights - two worlds that co-exist but rarely overlap. As he moves beyond the past while holding on to it, Bulman creates the presence of people, prayers, and places long gone, in the same way "time could turn loss into patina." Bulman's precise language allows him to conjure up poignant moments without running the risk of becoming overtly sentimental: but in the end when things melt / what we're left with are these carved out spaces / each with its own beauty of absence
Series
Language
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
ISBN-13
978-1-953829-55-9 (9781953829559)
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Schweitzer Classification
Pinny Bulman is a Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO award-winning poet. He has been winner of the Poets of NYC Contest, recipient of several ADR Poetry Awards, and a finalist for the Raynes Poetry Prize. His poems have been anthologized, including in the forthcoming The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2022 Multilingual Anthology (artepoética press, 2022) and in Korean translation for Bridging the Waters III (Korean Expatriate Literature & Cross-Cultural Communications, 2020). Additional literary publications include San Pedro River Review, great weather for MEDIA, The London Reader, Artemis, Muddy River Poetry Review, Red Paint Hill, Jewish Currents, and Poetry Quarterly, among others. Pinny was born and raised in Washington Heights, NYC, a neighborhood that continues to haunt his poetry. His "old shul" was the Washington Heights Congregation when it stood at 179th Street and Pinehurst Avenue, next to the entrance ramp of the George Washington Bridge. He currently lives in the Riverdale section of the Bronx with his wife and two children. When not writing poetry, Pinny works as a pediatric psychologist at a Montefiore integrated primary care clinic in the Bronx.
