With Bring Them Forth, Ruth Panofsky demonstrates her breathtaking adeptness with the spare yet powerful poem. With deft precision and meticulous attention to detail, the poems in Bring Them Forth achieve a remarkable expansiveness despite – or because of – their compression and brevity. The collection strikes a balance between the intimate/familial and the universal, exploring themes of memory, Jewish culture and identity, the female body, love, violence, grief, intergenerational trauma, and survival. These are big-hearted poems, unflinchingly honest, often heartbreaking poems, infused with warmth and humour as much as pathos. As the title implies, Panofsky brings so much forth – her memories, her experiences, her hard-won moments of clarity and insight. A deeply moving and resonant book.
Lisa Richter, author of Nautilus and Bone

In lines of compact discernment and visceral association, Ruth Panofsky explores the unsettled lifelines and fractured memories that bind intergenerational relationships. Arranged through the fragmented perspectives of childhood, adolescence, and maturity, Bring Them Forth crosses time with lyric intelligence submissive to silences that reside in language and memory: “You there / behind the closet door,” she writes to a younger self, “record these sounds / / bear them / in your body.” Corporeal insistence gives these coming-of-age poems great insight to the inner passions of family. Mothers and fathers bestow symbolic freight through their bodily actions, and the child, behind the closet door listens so that the poet may speak, years later through her uncertainty. Tenderness, humour, and bold self-inquiry bring forth a new reality from the immense weight of the past, renewed here by exquisite poetry – where new worlds arise from the old.
Dale Martin Smith, author of Flying Red Horse

Whether they are peeling back the scars of traumatic memory, or looking outward at a world both terrifying and full of wonder, Ruth Panofsky’s clear-voiced poems reveal hard-earned truths about what it is to be a woman, a Jew, and a human being in our current fraught moment.
Adam Sol, author of Broken Dawn Blessings

Ruth Panofsky is the author of three previous books of poetry: Radiant Shards: Hoda's North End Poems (2020), Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices (2007), and Lifeline (2001). Originally from Montreal, she now lives and writes in Toronto.