Hilda has been writing for most of her life and is the author of numerous books and collections of poetry. Her recent works include these seven. Additionally, selected titles edited by Hilda can be found here.
Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986–2020
University of Nebraska Press, 2021 edition, 480 pages
“Readers track Raz’s imaginative language across the decades, as she mourns and meditates, catalogs and investigates. Resisting the cultural and technological policing of women’s bodies, the poet evokes illness, recovery, sorrow, and delight. These narrators—gritty, world-loving, tenacious—bind the personal and political in unforgettable family and diasporic narratives.” —Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me
>> Read Review: “New collection recognizes Raz as poet and Nebraska literary lion,” Nebraska Today, June 14, 2020.
List and Story
Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2020, 88 pages
“‘Here then is my life in letters. A great weight,’ writes Hilda Raz. This harvest—of art, of ripe heirloom tomatoes, of bobcats and lightning—nourishes us body and soul. This poet wants ‘to know how women sound in their heads.’ These poems offer that, plus the beauty of ‘the glow we can’t see by,’ the great mysteries of time and love and the night sky. Here is a poetry in the company of nature and art, saying YES out loud. Here is a poetry that acknowledges death, its nearness, then invites it to the table, where we feast. Thank you, Hilda Raz, for a masterful, profound collection.” —Peggy Shumaker, author of Cairn: New and Selected Poems
>> Watch a Bookworks Albuquerque interview reading about List and Story with novelist Lynn Miller.
All Odd and Splendid: Poems
University of Nebraska Press, 2021 edition, 102 pages
Hilda Raz’s collection of poems is an exploration of lives and selves transformed by choice and by chance. Formally and thematically diverse, these poems are testament to the will to redefine oneself in a world of constant, and often painful, change. “A carefully and superbly constructed collection filled with music, musicality and breath that provides glimpses of where ‘We all travel from’ as well as where we are going.”—Andrea Scarpino, Rattle
Divine Honors: Poems
Winner of the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry (2002)
University of Nebraska Press, 2021 edition, 120 pages
This elegant and moving collection documents Hilda Raz’s experience with breast cancer. The journey—from diagnosis to chemotherapy to mastectomy, from denial to humor to grief and rage—is ultimately one of courage and creativity. The poems themselves are accessible and finely wrought. They are equally testaments to Raz’s insistence on making an order out of chaos, of finding ways to create and understand and eventually accept new definitions of good and evil, health, blame, personal boundaries—in short, a new sense of self.
Trans: Poems
University of Nebraska Press, 2021 edition, 480 pages
This elegant and moving collection of poems grew out of Hilda Raz’s experience with her son’s journey to a transgender identity. Born Sarah, now Aaron, Raz’s child has had a profound impact on her understanding of what it means to be a family, to be whole, and to know oneself. The collection moves between past and present, allowing Raz to reflect on her own childhood and on her experience with breast cancer to find ways to connect with Aaron. The journey takes us from intimacy to strangeness and back again, from denial to humor to grief and rage, but always laced with love and acceptance.
What Happens: Poems
University of Nebraska Press, 2021 edition, 138 pages
Readers will find two separate books here, by poet Hilda Raz, originally published as The Bone Dish and What Is Good, brought together for the first time as the author intended. These musically wrought and emotionally candid poems explore the pleasure and pain of family relationships, the complicated joy of being a woman, and the unconventional beauty of the Great Plains. Readers will meet Raz’s son, Aaron, and find themselves drawn to fundamental questions about identity and belonging.
What Becomes You
University of Nebraska Press, 2021 edition, 324 pages
“Being a man, like being a woman, is something you have to learn,” Aaron Raz Link remarks. Few would know this better than the coauthor of What Becomes You, who began life as a girl named Sarah and twenty-nine years later began life anew as a gay man. Turning from female to male and from teaching scientist to theatre performer, Link documents the extraordinary medical, social, legal, and personal process involved in a complete identity change. Hilda Raz, a well-known feminist writer and teacher, observes the process as both an “astonished” parent and as a professor who has studied gender issues. All these perspectives come into play in this collaborative memoir, which travels between women’s experience and men’s lives, explores the art and science of changing sex, maps uncharted family values, and journeys through a world transformed by surgery, hormones, love, and . . . clown school. Combining personal experience and critical analysis, the book is an unusual—and unusually fascinating—reflection on gender, sex, and the art of living.