Books
Nonlinear Equations for Growing Better Olive Trees
Recently published, Kelsey Books, 2023
I liked my career in biochemical oncology,
but the nomenclature bored me, lacking
the spice of common names and not conveying
the architecture of discovery and wonder.
“Therefore, Edward Nudelman became a poet. One of the great pleasures of this collection is seeing the natural world as inflected by his scientist’s mind and poet’s heart. The result is a poetry unlike anything I’ve read before. Nudelman’s “architecture of discovery and wonder” reveals, again and again, the miraculous, the revelatory, in the ordinary world around us. He shows us what we’ve missed. And isn’t that why we came to poetry in the first place? Nonlinear Equations for Growing Better Olives is one of the freshest, most bracingly intelligent books I’ve read in a very long time.”
-George Bilgere. Published six collections of poetry, including Imperial (2014); The White Museum (2010), which was awarded the Autumn House Poetry Prize; Haywire (2006), which on the May Swenson Poetry Award; and The Good Kiss (2002), which was selected by Billy Collins to win the University of Akron Poetry Award. He has won numerous awards, including the Midland Authors Award and a Pushcart Prize.
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“Mixing the nomenclature of science with poignant metaphors drawn from the natural world, personal experience and acute observation, Edward Nudelman’s Nonlinear Equations for Growing Better Olives is lit by wings, by fish, by lizards, by trout, by blackbirds and all manner of beings. A biochemical oncologist, Nudelman’s clinical vocabulary makes a contrapuntal contrast with his accessible imagery as he dives deep into an exploration of the nature of the universe and into his complex relationship with his family. His poems circle back and project ahead in time and space. Nudelman’s imagery is infused with beauty. In “Unhinged,” he writes, “Morning sun blisters through a window—alpine/rivers fill with trout—the current, a rippling arrow.” Nudelman is at his finest in lines like, “Archimedes grabbed/a lever, and the Earth/moved an inch off center./Gravity has you by your feet/but your heart remains/a secret in the sway/of cloud and pillar.” I greatly admire his deft use of music in lines like, “I’ve strummed a palm leaf to silence/my mind’s electronic hissing, jettisoned/trigonometry in favor of a few visions/describing the lure of commonplace.” This unique book of poems strikes all the right chords, making an important addition to any library.
-Pamela Uschuk. Her seven poetry collections include Crazy Love (American Book Award), Blood Flower, and Refugee. Translated into twelve languages, her work appears widely in Poetry, Ploughshares, and others. Awards include Best of the Web, Dorothy Daniels Award (National League of American PEN Women), prizes from Ascent, New Millenium & Amnesty International. She is the Editor of Cutthroat Poetry Journal, and other journals.
Thin Places
Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, 2024
“In Thin Places, Ed Nudelman, a retired cancer researcher, brings a scientist’s keen observation and balanced equanimity to bear on our “ordinary,” if sometimes painful, human experiences. With gentleness and patience, Nudelman watches the doings of fruit flies, humming birds, and moles, as well as his mother’s progress into the wilds of Alzheimer’s disease. This book is, by turns, comic, joyful, and heart-breaking.”
—Rae Armantrout. One of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets, and author of more than ten collections of poetry, including Versed (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Wobble (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Armantrout is a professor emerita at University of California, San Diego, where she taught for more than 20 years and was the longtime director of the New Writing Series.
Out of Time, Running
Harbor Mountain Press, 2014
“Before reading, ‘Each shivering microliter bifurcates/equal parts myth and discovery,’ I would not have guessed science could be so beautifully scientific. For all their courageous, hopeful, wise and soulful assertions, confident voice, music and metaphors, these poems play at the edge of the Grand Canyon of the is we cannot wholly know, lofting their melodies over the cliff—or as Edward Nudelman has it, ‘the oak… buckles,/while the poem moves forward,/balancing on its good leg.’”
—April Ossmann. Poet, teacher, editor, is the author of “Anxious Music” and “Event Boundaries,” both from Four Way Books. From 2000-2008., Ossmann was the Executive Director of Alice James Books, noted poetry publisher, where she left to found a successful consulting business helping poets to get published. Her poems are widely read and admired.
What Looks Like an Elephant
Lummox Press, 2012
"In moments documentary, in moments meditative, these poems are pared and spare, carefully wrought and duly lined, availing absences and openings for the poet's and the reader's late longings to collude."
—Scott Cairns. Author of eight books of poetry. A Guggenheim Fellow, Cairns in 2006, served as editor of the American Literary Review, was founding director of Writing Workshops in Greece, and is an accomplished memoirs, librettist, and essayist. He has served on the poetry faculty of the Seattle Pacific University low-residency MFA program in creative writing.
Night Fires
Pudding House Press, 2009*
“Edward Nudelman constructs the myriad nature and background of a series of wobbling selves in forensic detail. Through significant domestic arrangements, shifts, absences, habits, games and memorable events the knowing self is framed. Nudelman’s open and ensuring mind, use of direct speech and honesty make this impressive first collection greater than the sum of its parts. I can thoroughly recommend Night Fires.”
—Grace Cavalieri. Prolific and author of eight books of poetry. She is a playwright, and radio host of "The Poet and the Poem" from the Library of Congress, which has run for decades. She was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland, in 2019.
*not available, some copies may be obtained through author