Fella Cederbaum’s More Other Such Matters is a book of spiritually searching poems that circle around identity, love, mortality, truth, and the terrible persistence of the thinking mind. The collection moves less like a narrative than like a sustained act of inquiry, each poem worrying at the same great questions from a different angle until they start to glow. Again and again, Cederbaum turns to direct address and cascading questions, asking what remains when profession, doctrine, self-image, fear, and even opinion fall away. Poems like “Before You Were You,” “Faith,” “The Knower And The Known,” and “The Mirror” make the book feel like both a meditation manual and a private reckoning, though its strongest moments are more intimate and embodied than abstract.

What struck me most was the book’s unusual combination of severity and tenderness. Cederbaum can sound almost admonishing, as if she’s trying to shake the reader awake, but there’s warmth under that urgency, and often a real ache. I felt that most sharply in poems where the philosophical pressure gives way to something bruised and personal, like the old tears in “Love Broke Through,” the lonely vastness of “One Single Tear,” or the quietly devastating recognition in “What I Thought I Wanted,” where imagined identities keep turning bland in the hand. Even the more playful poems, especially “My Universe of Cheese,” have that same undercurrent: delight laced with metaphysical impatience. I admired the refusal to settle for easy consolation. This isn’t poetry interested in decorating experience. It wants to strip experience bare.

The book is most effective when its style becomes genuinely musical. Cederbaum has a real instinct for repetition, for the pressure of a recurring phrase, for the way a question can become its own rhythm. Her best lines have lift and clarity, and her images can be surprisingly memorable, as with the orchid and the daisy, the cat as a silent teacher in “Medical Journeys,” or the mirror that keeps changing with praise, desire, and self-doubt until the poem lands on a wiser, steadier truth. The poems return often to oneness, surrender, and the unreliability of thought. But even then, the voice is unmistakably authentic.

I found More Other Such Matters earnest, searching, and often deeply affecting. It’s a book less interested in polish than in penetration, less interested in literary coyness than in saying the largest things as plainly as possible. I think readers drawn to spiritual poetry, contemplative writing, and emotionally candid meditations on selfhood, love, and impermanence will find a great deal here.

Pages: 156 | ASIN : B0FR37DNSZ