All Seeds Blended

By Fania Kruger

Edited by Bert Kruger Smith

We need the voices of the grandmothers, the elders. We need to listen to the ones who survived mass persecution. These things will not change unless we listen. This is a selected works, compiled from early books by the poet's daughter, Bert Kruger Smith. The final vision--tolerance, peace, family and holiness, emerges from the magical soul of the poet.

This work is simply too important to be lost. We recommend it, along with the Kruger papers, to graduate students looking for primary work upon which to base a dissertation and to teachers.

"All Seeds Blended" was created in conjunction with an exhibition of the poet's papers collected at the University of Texas, HRC Library.

"These are not poems of uplift for such as may need it. Some recall the frontal, angular oddness of so-called naive paintings. Others are like sayings from an apocryphal scripture of suffering, which tells how survivors of terrible persecutions find one another again, in some extraordinary tenderness, and begin to grasp what joy can mean."
Christopher Middleton, Poet, Professor of Germanic Languages, University of Texas at Austin.

"Fania Kruger, a refugee from the pogroms of Czarist Russia, starkly confronts the pain, loss, cruelty and death that she had known. What we hear in these poems, as those of us who knew Fania heard directly, are not hopelessness or despair, but compassion, warmth, a vibrant sense of life and a spirituality centered in our very mortality."
Alan W. Friedman, Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin

Art by Randy Smith Huke

ISBN: 0-911051-77-5

88 pgs., $14.95