Twenty Girls to Envy Me by Orit Gidali and translated by Marcela Sulak

This is poetry from Israel.

Twenty Girls to Envy Me by Orit Gidali translated by Marcela Sulak is published by Center for Middle Eastern Studies. This is a Book originally written in Hebrew. This was published in 2016.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781477309575E12.

Twenty Girls to Envy Me, by Orit Gidali and translated by Marcela Sulak from Hebrew, brings Hebrew-language poetry from Israel into English through envy, girlhood, and Orit Gidali’s sharp lyric intelligence around gendered desire and social comparison. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for girls, envy, beauty, and the intimate cruelty of wanting a life adjacent to one’s own, not as a fixed lesson about Israel. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Twenty Girls to Envy Me belongs in the translated poetry library because it brings contemporary Hebrew feminist lyric energy into the shelf.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.