Zaftig
In her exceptional debut collection of poems, Molly Raynor welcomes you to sit at the table with her ancestors, mothers, sisters, friends, and wild women as she glues together moving memories of waxy-lipped kisses and potato peel dresses. Ghosts of the old country, lost loves, and the unborn haunt Zaftig. Raynor’s poems are imbued with deep Judaic traditions and a sprinkle of Yiddish. They burst forth with sensuality, survival, and the push-pull of women’s bodies as coveted flesh. Braiding together words like bread to lay on the table in honor of the beauty & the terror of living, these poems breathe new life. Inspired by the past, but firmly planted in the present, Zaftig joyfully takes up space like the powerful women who fill Raynor’s heart and words.
- Erin Helmrich, Fifth Avenue Press Editor
“Zaftig honors an incredible inheritance of women whose intergenerational presences touch the pages, stewarding expansive agency, faith, ritual, memory, labor, desire, return, [and] love…”
“In Zaftig, Molly Raynor weaves a lush, poetic garland of care, devotion, and attention toward creative lineage. Zaftig honors an incredible inheritance of women whose intergenerational presences touch the pages, stewarding expansive agency, faith, ritual, memory, labor, desire, return, love, love, love. These are poems as praise songs, poems as “joyarrows,” poems as archival memory, poems as recipes, poems as space-making and space-taking, poems as altars, poems as wisdom held in lipsticked mouths, poems as coordinates—mapping the strength and labor of reclaiming solitude, and the self in relation. As poems in Zaftig honor inherited memory, these poems also chart an embodied future. Raynor crafts poems that celebrate a life made possible by lives before and around us. This book is its own garden of wild, tender, radiant, communal blooming. How unbelievably lucky we are for Zaftig, and for the poetry of Molly Zipora Pershin Feigele Raynor.”
— Carlina Duan, Author of Alien Miss
Praise for Zaftig
“Zaftig breathes you into a room love made wide with its bare hands.”
“Upon entering the wilderness of this collection, one must remove their shoes. Zaftig breathes you into a room love made wide with its bare hands. Where, nestled deep in the sibilant lure of stoves singing their lineage, rests a reverent archive braided between red lipstick scripture, sacrifice, and resilient sweet/softness. Through visceral portmanteau, Molly Raynor unswallows the yellow song of littlebirdlungs, passed along generations of women for whom remembering is ritual and who brim with ‘the weight of bearing witness’. An uncurling matryoshka of sensory lyricism, Zaftig pours from its highest altar the mothertongued tradition of sucking marrow to survive. To reach its end is to return with more.”
— Kush Thompson, Author of A Church Beneath the Bulldozer
“Raynor’s poems possess the singular power to shine and sing, as either an act of praising a perfect moment or triumphantly rising from the tatters of devastation.”
“It’s time to celebrate the arrival of Molly Raynor’s Zaftig. It’s time we discuss Raynor’s rare and distinct craft. In the span of a little over thirty pages, Raynor resoundingly declares her poetics, which are equally invested in virtuosity, reflection, imagination, and world making—a unique and striking combination. In Zaftig’s pages we: smell magnolia, daylilies, roses; hear prayer, Billie Holiday, Lil’ Wayne, and the ghosts of foremothers; we see candles flicker, the soul deep gaze of lovers, and the bloodorange sky; we taste sugar cubes, chicken fricassee, and ginger rum; we feel the suppleness of breasts and hips, the winds of Russia, Lake Michigan, and the Pacific Ocean—we are immersed in the visceral, the fragrant, and the complex. While ranging in themes, Raynor’s poems possess the singular power to shine and sing, as either an act of praising a perfect moment or triumphantly rising from the tatters of devastation.”
— Yalie Saweda Kamara, author of BESAYDOO
“her poems sing like spells, rituals, & recipes. Zaftig is not a book of poems, but a place I will return to when I need to be nourished. ”
“Molly Zipora Pershin Feigele Raynor knows something about lineage––the etymology of which, in its most literal sense, is “string, thread, line.” Raynor powerfully claims, “In the end, I want to be something.” But she knows that to get to the end, you need to honor the beginning. She knows that to be something threatens our reductive & shaming culture. With a lyric touch that is “shanklike & creamlike all at once” she threads her ancestors to her side, refusing to be minimized by misogyny or men. Instead, her poems sing like spells, rituals, & recipes. Zaftig is not a book of poems, but a place I will return to when I need to be nourished. As much a kitchen as it is a book. Here, juiciness is law & the chef is tender & wise, “the kind of woman / who sucks the marrow from bones, / who sprouts cherries from her skull.” May this lineage of marrow-sucking, cherry-sprouting women continue. Raynor is leading the way. ”
— Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium
