Heredity and Other Inventions

by Sharona Muir

After the sudden death of her father, a freelance inventor and Holocaust survivor, Sharona Muir discovered that he had invented Israel’s first rocket in the 1940s. These poems arise from her search—ranging from Israel’s public spaces to her own deepest memories—for the meanings of father and daughter, heredity and history, as she ponders the fact that “my DNA is bound up with the State.” While Muir has stories to tell, her poetry’s intelligence, power, and formal beauty transform personal and historical perspectives into “the human truth you survived so it might answer you.”

44 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2017

About the author

Sharona Muir is the author of The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives, a collection of poetry, a collection of literary criticism, and the novel Invisible Beasts. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Orion magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University; two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships; the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship; the Bernard F. Connors Prize, and other awards. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University.