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"absolute animal subtly exposes the thin line separating humans from other living things, those inarguable similarities to the earth and how they lead us to long for its connection. . . a graceful reminder of why links to other living things matter and why examining the human experience is one of our only respites from what we cannot change."
- Chicago Review of Books

"This is no maudlin collection. The lists’ momentum serves a distinctive voice and humor, as does the order of poems. . . what could be more 'animal' than our mortality, more human than our cognizance of it?"
— Poetry Foundation

"DeWoskin has helped me listen across registers.... These poems leave behind an intense quiet that helps me attend to the unspoken world. With them, I encounter 'the heat of being / alive.' Inside of DeWoskin’s sometimes frightening, often joyous poetic landscape, I can hear across epochs, language, and species."
-- Arrowsmith Press

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“DeWoskin’s sophisticated, clever poetry, vacillating between soft and sonic, manages to break into the parts of the human story that so often seem inaccessible, or at least indescribable.”
― Newcity Lit

"These story-like poems, accessible to even the finickiest nonreaders of poetry, travel fast and span a lifetime... a remarkable debut, a veritable smorgasbord to appeal in equal measure to both the poetry finicky and the poem gourmand. Bon appétit."
― Coachella Review

“DeWoskin’s range includes fresh new visions of Chinese language and culture, which lead to new ways of understanding an American life; new ways of using rhyme, happily melding sonnets and hip-hop; fresh, uncowed understandings of the historic past... a great, illuminating pleasure.”
-- Robert Pinsky, author of At the Foundling Hospital

"A debut of stunning clarity and formal dexterity. DeWoskin is a poet of things, of the image, and of the narratives that attention to image allows. This is a beautiful book."
-- Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

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Winner of the National Jewish Book Award

★ "DeWoskin explores a rarely depicted topic... A beautifully nuanced exploration of culture and people."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

★ "DeWoskin, who has lived in China, has done meticulous research, but what stands out is her lyrical, sensitive portrayal of families struggling to survive during wartime... An unusual portrait of what war does to families in general and children in particular... affirms the human need for art and beauty in hard times."
—Booklist, starred review

“Rachel DeWoskin’s storytelling features an extraordinary combination of curiosity and kindness, on top of a belief that everyone can have an impact on the world they find themselves in. Someday We Will Fly is the powerful, adventurous story of a teenager who confronts the brutal history with courage, love, and imagination. I could not put it down.”
—Aleksandar Hemon, author of Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project

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“Sexy and sad, dark and funny, ruthless and kind, this is Rachel DeWoskin’s ferociously feminist masterpiece. Every page of it glitters with rage and with love... It radiates with truth.”
―Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, Tiny Beautiful Things, and Torch

“A wicked, delicious ride towards an ambivalent redemption―angry, hilarious, all too true.”
―Ally Sheedy, actress and author

“Banshee is the kind of book every woman I know wishes she'd written. Fierce, necessary, honest, a burn-it-all-down scorched earth policy to the toxic masculinity of this Age of Terror.”
―Emily Rapp-Black, author of Poster Child and The Still Point of the Turning World

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★ "A profound YA debut"
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

★ "With traces of John Green’s Looking for Alaska. . . a vivid, sensory tour of the shifting landscapes of blindness and teen relationships"
—Kirkus, starred review

"A well-researched and much-needed story. Emma is a capable heroine who manages her disability with realism and grace."
—School Library Journal

"Blind. . . allow[s] readers to inhabit another person’s soul so fully that they will be unable to separate the heroine’s pain from their own... for sheer emotional profundity and the elusive feeling of living another person's experience through fiction, DeWoskin is hard to beat."
—SF Weekly

“Blind is soon to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues.”
—Bustle.com, Best YA Books

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“Wonderfully engaging…captures the way adolescence renders one's own identity somehow unknowable, perhaps because ‘we contain various versions of ourselves,' and high school is the time of maximum pressure to choose just one.”
―The Boston Globe

“Amusing, hypnotic...Like a contemporary version of The Wizard of Oz or its coming-of-age antecedent, Alice in Wonderland, Judy's experiences of adolescence are exhilarating, terrifying, and almost uniformly surreal.”
―Time Out New York

“Compelling...Big Girl Small brings back high school in raw, oozing detail, like a psychic skinned knee.”
―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

“A fine novel…The desire to find out precisely what [happened to Judy] will keep you reading as fast as you can.”
―The Dallas Morning News

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★ “Cultures don’t so much collide as coalesce in DeWoskin’s sparkling debut novel... Infusing her multicultural narrative with vibrant observations that glitter with laser-intense acuity, DeWoskin demonstrates a smart, sophisticated literary agility.”
— Booklist, starred review

"A tender story of manic love and loss, this is a heartbreaking and uplifting novel with memorably off-kilter leads."
— Publishers Weekly

"Thrilling, surprising, funny and moving narrative, characters I care about and cannot predict — Repeat After Me has everything I want in a novel... a memorable work of art."
— Robert Pinsky, author of Gulf Music

"I am full of admiration for how deeply DeWoskin knows the streets of both Manhattan and Beijing, and how effortlessly she transports her reader between the two. Repeat After Me made my life feel larger in the best possible way."
— Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street

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'Smart and funny, this memoir is a fortune cookie of a book: Crack it open,
there's wisdom inside.'
—Marie Claire

'DeWoskin recounts, in this deft, daffy comedy of errors, her improbable adventures as a soap opera queen and her fumbling journey through the new entrepreneurial China.'
—New York Times

'DeWoskin's cleverly layered account charts parallel culture clashes, one that she experiences as a Western woman in modern China, and the other, a TV-ready version of the first, tailored to Chinese expectations.'
—The New Yorker

'A memoir that offers an intelligent and complex portrait of what it is like to be a young American woman on the mainland..'
—The Wall Street Journal

'Readers will feel lucky to have the sharp-eyed, yet sisterly, DeWoskin sitting in the driver's seat.'
—Elle

Home[email protected]2024-01-11T13:39:57+00:00

Recent Posts and Upcoming Events:

Rachel DeWoskin

1 week ago

It's the 20th anniversary of my first book, Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China (WW Norton, 2005). What a wild ride then and now. Thank you to everyone who has read FBIB over the years and written to me -- and thank you to all the Beijingers and fellow laowai I loved and love. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/18/foreign-babes-in-beijing ... See MoreSee Less

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Rachel DeWoskin

2 weeks ago

Join me tonight at the Chicago Humanities Festival in conversation with Fredrik Backman about his lively new novel, My Friends. ... See MoreSee Less

Fredrik Backman: My Friends

www.chicagohumanities.org

On his newest work of fiction

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Rachel DeWoskin

1 month ago

Join Thea Goodman, Lisa Lee, and me tonight for a celebration of Elise Paschen and her new collection Blood Wolf Moon. ❤️ ... See MoreSee Less

Travelers in the Mist: A Celebration of Poet Elise Paschen

chicagoliteraryhof.org

Friday, April 11, 2025 — Elise Paschen, one of Chicago's most important writers, releases her sixth poetry collection, <em>Blood Wolf Moon</em>, on April 10, 2025. The following night, the Chicago L...

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Rachel DeWoskin

3 months ago

this poetry reading i got to do this week with carolyn forche is one of my favorite events of all time. if you missed it, here's a recording - her wisdom during the q&a is astonishing— about the poetry of witness, the power of poetry in general, and what we can do now in the world (refuse). ... See MoreSee Less

Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom ...

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Rachel DeWoskin

3 months ago

thank you, to the bridge, for this thoughtful and lovely review of absolute animal: ... See MoreSee Less

www.bridge-chicago.org

Rachel DeWoskin’s book is a journey through feelings, behaviors, and actions. The poems within act as a bridge of expression between how all living fauna act on their experiences. There are tales of...

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