Praise for My Shtetl:

Open to any poem in Robert Cooperman’s My Shtetl and be so delighted you won’t want to put the book down. Much more comes alive here than one man’s childhood Brooklyn neighborhood, its Yiddish flavors, its tales of a family of American Jews who don’t look, no different from real folks. He may have been a nebbish in his youth, tripped up by kids so cool, they had only to look at him, and he’d tumble to the ground, but as this deeply engaging collection demonstrates, Robert Cooperman became a poet with the talent and compassion to deliver our recognizable world and its people in poems rich in detail and consequence.

—Andrea Hollander Budy

Bursting with marvelous incongruities Keats poetry saving the day at a post office, a woman concealing a hunted Jew and thanking him for paying her entrance fee to Christian heaven, cheerleaders urging violence in Yiddish—Cooperman’s poems embody, in supremely sustaining language, the wisdom of survival: They tried to kill us, they failed; let’s eat.

—Angela Ball

Robert Cooperman has a great gift for telling stories in his poems. In My Shtetl he draws from the richness of the American Jewish heritage to create a unified and beautiful poem tapestry. He avoids the sentimental but is not afraid of feeling. His clarity makes each poem memorable and the entire collection worth reading, and savoring, again and again.

—Ken Pobo

My Shtetl is number five in the Holland Series, published by Logan House.

Born and raised on the not-so-mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, Robert Cooperman now calls Denver home, where he has turned his love of the Old West into a cottage industry of poetry collections about the Colorado Territory and other aspects of frontier life. The Devil Who Raised Me (the origin story of Cooperman’s hyper-violent alter ego, the badman John Sprockett) is Robert Cooperman’s twentieth collection and tells how a nice kid turned into a stone killer.  In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Closer to Cooperman’s Brooklyn origins, My Shtetl won the Holland Award from Logan House Press. Cooperman’s most recent collections are Their Wars (about his parents’ travails at Fort Bragg at the end of WWII), brought out by Kelsay Books, and That Summer, published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company, about Cooperman’s European wanderings in the summer of 1970. Cooperman’s chapbook/love letter to the Grateful Dead, Saved by the Dead, was published by Liquid Light Press.

My Shtetl
Robert Copperman
Perfect paperback: 95 pages
Logan House (May 31, 2010) $12
ISBN-13: 978-0976993568