Today I received another review of Jewtown, my first from a Jewish reviewer and my first from someone outside of Ireland. Natalie Wood of PerfectlyWritePoetry published her review on the eve of Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year, and I was very pleased with her words. She also published “Tashlich”, one of the poems in the collection, which is set around this time of the year.
I always find people’s favourite poems in the collection interesting and I was surprised that this was Natalie’s. Tashlich nearly didn’t make the collection. On the 1st edit, it was one place above the cut-off point so I made a few changes to bring it up a bit. On the 2nd and 3rd edit, it still hovered above, what I called, the “relegation zone” and just before the 4th edit, I cut out the bottom half of what was the poem and changed the last line.
Natalie also reviewed the book on GoodReads, where it is averaging a 4.2 rating now.
