Book Reviews for
Butterfly Words
Relationships: A Psychiatrist Narrative
By Daniel Rosen, MD
International Psychoanalytic Books
New York, 2019
“Daniel Rosen's writing is tuned not only to the words, but the mysterious entities that lurk behind them. Jewish imagination at its very best!”
-RUBY NAMDAR, author of The Ruined House
Winner of the Sapir Prize, Israel's highest literary award
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“Butterfly Words is a collection of writings—stories, poetry, essays, letters—which transit many worlds: Paris, Jerusalem, New York, the secular and the religious, the professional and the personal. While parts of the “story” are explicit, other parts are omitted, and in a sense, the reader is asked to become psychiatrist to this psychiatrist/writer, to engage with what’s said, to speculate about the unsaid. Robert Frost once said, ‘It’s poetry that’s lost in translation.’ But when translation is a necessity of moving between worlds, we glimpse the work that Dr. Rosen’s languages must do. Meaning and beauty are sometimes captured in his English, French, and Hebrew, and sometimes hover between. From Shhh—‘Just peek at him/And see how much pleasure he has /In his eyes/ Just sitting next to you.’ ”
-OWEN LEWIS, author of Sometimes Full of Daylight
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University
2016 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine
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“What is one to do with history?
with what has come before and is no more
yet lays on one like a heavy blanket,
deadweight.
In this quiet book
he keeps trying to bury other men’s ghosts
to no avail, I am afraid
as they linger to the last page.
Veter is Latin for beast of burden
and indeed
one feels his labored breath
as he carefully steps
from page to page
up and on in light and shadow
carrying us with his pen
and soldier’s heart."
-DAVID READ JOHNSON, co-author of Principles and Techniques of Trauma-centered Psychotherapy
Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry at Yale University