See What You Think

Above all, I love the tone: unexpected, at times outrageous, seemingly
relaxed but actually urgent, inspiring, lifting, elevating—quintessentially Rosenberg.
Grace Schulman

What do we mean when we speak of visionary poetry? From the uncanny
vision of the group birth of John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait In a Convex Mirror” at
Kenward Elmslie’s Vermont summer house, to the poet-filled NYU classroom
of Harold Bloom, to the Vancouver archive of bp Nichol, translator/poet of
Sumerian cuneiform, back to Eden itself as it is revealed in the Kabbalah,
David Rosenberg’s trajectory has led him through all the “sublime disguises” that
the visionary must assume in order to speak his gnosis. These essays are
addressed to “the next avant garde”—not fashionable bohemians or recherché
theorists, but dedicated trackers on the evolutionary path. Beyond the illusion
of schools and styles, Rosenberg knows that poets are the ecologists of Paradise.
Norman Finkelstein

David Rosenberg has pulled off a quirky, original and persistently stimulating and
entertaining book. He has kept the faith with the avant-garde, while transcending
its limitations and hermeticisms. A delicious achievement. Phillip Lopate

David Rosenberg’s essays inhabit that borderland where art and science, spirit and
body, the literal and the metaphorical, the human and the non-human, the oral and
the transcribed all blur together. Rosenberg is uninhibited in the best sense of the
word, and his essays are inspiring reminders of just how strange it is to be human,
trailing an evolutionary past and dreaming of a limitless future. Jonathan Rosen

Nothing else is like these pieces. There is a certain dream character to them,
as when we recognize everyone in the room, except that they are different. As
in a transforming mythography, they are the same and not-same. Michael Palmer

Dreams of Being Eaten Alive
“Rosenberg's strength is his ability to convey both the high dramatic force of the piece and
the uncanny defamiliarizing of the biblical text on which it is based, while at the same time
retaining an earthy humor.” Jonathan Wilson, New York Times Book Review

The Book of J
“An illuminating attempt to liberate the origins of the Bible…a classic of translation.” Greil Marcus

The Lost Book of Paradise
“A love story between two poet-scholars: a contemporary one, David Rosenberg, and an
ancient one, a woman who sprang from his desire and imagination.” Andrei Codrescu, NPR, All Things Considered

A Poet's Bible “Rosenberg's translations from the Hebrew Bible are the best in the
twentieth century without a doubt.” Hayden Carruth, The Nation

David Rosenberg

Of David Rosenberg's books in the past decade, two have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year, while a
third, A Poet's Bible, was given the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the first major literary award for a biblical translation.
Rosenberg's The Book of J, with commentary by Harold Bloom, was a national bestseller. More recently, his 1973 volume, The
Necessity of Poetry, was restored online (chbooks.com) and his book on the Kabbalah, Dreams of Being Eaten Alive, has been
released in paperback. Residing in Berkeley with his wife, the writer Rhonda Rosenberg, he is completing the second biography
of Abraham.