Poetry. ON RUINS & RETURN is Rachel Tzvia Back's second full-length collection and tracks the cycle of violence marking the lives of Palestinians and Israelis in the last intifadah (uprising)."The past exists in layers of our present and perhaps nowhere more powerfully than in the place evoked in this beautiful and haunting collection of poems. Rachel Tzvia Back's passionate historical sense illuminates ways in which outer violence touches our deepest subconscious. From a complex of shared circumstances within the seemingly endless struggle between Israel and Palestine, she draws spiritual sustenance. When hope is in retreat and there seems to be 'nothing left / resembling the human / but soldiers on their knees / in the sand, ' the austere beauty of this poetry remains." Susan Howe".