Gloria Gervitz, Migrations/Migraciones

To say that this is a book of the immigrant experience–which in some sense it is–is to underrate the range of form and feeling that Gervitz brings to it, creating thereby an epic of the migratory self. Like Pound’s Cantos or Zukofsky’s A, hers is the work of a lifetime: a life’s work including not only autobiography and familial memories as a kind of history but rife with religious and mystical imagery from Jewish kabbala to Mexican folk Catholicism and beyond. Migrations takes its place with theirs as a long and difficult poem which is the achievement of a great poetic talent: a complex tribute to the complex world from which it comes.
    - Jerome Rothenberg

Migrations presents the unmistakable, majestic voice of Gloria Gervitz, one of the most powerful and original voices of contemporary Jewish Latin American literature, in all its fullness, and Mark Schafer’s translation does it justice. Mystical, at times wrenching, it is a poem of ancestral as well as modern voices, a poem that should be read slowly as if reading a prayer.
    - Marjorie Agosín

Migraciones is an extraordinary and deeply moving poem. Gloria Gervitz looks out all the world’s windows and Mark Schafer throws them open to gather in the most soaring and luminous of words. Migraciones is a journey to the depths, to the heights, and across the range of our most profound emotions. This is poetry that rains inside us, leading us back to primordial waters.
    - Elena Poniatowska

The sorrowful voice of Gloria Gervitz resounds within a terrifying vastness. Her words-prayer, oracle, litany-soar and plunge into the abyss, tempered by a breath that transcends meaning. They cross to the other side, to what precedes them, where submerged words breathe. Born of dark silence, her poetry rescues memory; it returns to the origin of its own pale dreams. Her poetry enthralls and overwhelms..
    - Saúl Yurkievich

A dramatic affirmation that wonderful poetry still comes out of Mexico.
    - Tony Fraser