Dear Sal by Jeremy Radin

Jeremy Radin’s second full-length collection uses as its foundation Lanford Wilson’s 1979 play, Talley’s Folly, detailing the 1944 courtship of a nurse’s aide from a Protestant family by a German-Jewish accountant. Given in the text is the fact that, prior to the events of the play, the accountant had, for one full year, written and sent a letter a day to the nurse’s aide. The poems in this series emerged from the rehearsal process of the play, in which the author played the accountant, intended as a way in which to generate a greater understanding of the character, but ended up taking on a life of their own; exploring the middle ground between actor and role, as communion between withheld desire, perceived unlovability, diasporic Jewishness, loss of faith in the body and the spaces the body occupies, and ultimately, a tremulous sort of hope.