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Discover A Glimpse Of Truth
More Other Such Matters is a collection of spiritually searching poems that circle around identity, love, mortality, truth, and the persistence of the thinking mind that asks what remains when the thinking mind finally grows quiet. Do you see thinking as a barrier to truth, or a doorway that must be passed through?
I see it neither as a barrier, nor as a doorway. The mistake we make is that we get attached to our thoughts and mistake them for truth and then identify ourselves via those thoughts. Truth reveals itself when thoughts are left behind. In that sense we can use thoughts until they exhaust themselves and in the exhaustion, in that dead end, we might discover a glimpse of truth.
Many poems read like questions rather than declarations. Why is inquiry more important than certainty for you?
The origin of my poems lies in the questions that have posed themselves around everything, ever since I was young. When I started writing those questions I usually found that the things I thought I knew revealed themselves to be mere outer layers of deeper truths, which in turn, at some later point, would probably get turned on their head by more questions.
Declarations, while giving the impression of safety, a ground to stand on, are mostly self-defeating, rigid and therefore not really compatible with life. Life itself is constant change, a constant adventure of discovery. Once you draw the circumference of certainty around things, around your mind, it turns rigid and eventually gets suffocated inside dead concepts. If you dig deeply enough and with inner honesty, you will find that certainty does not really exist.
Are the more intimate poems, like those centered on love and loss, harder to write than the philosophical ones?
Not at all. I don’t set out to write poems of a certain category. All my poems start out with a kind of urgency of something wanting to be explored or said, or maybe even screamed out. I just follow their lead and sit down to write them down. They usually emerge fully formed, even though I often don’t have the slightest clue where they are taking me. Sometimes a poem about loss, for example, turns philosophical in the process of diving into the loss itself rather than avoiding it, by merely describing it from the outside.
You asked about a doorway before. The doorway is the very process of not avoiding anything that wants to show up, of digging into the deepest places I can reach, whether jubilant or terrifying.
I wonder whether purely philosophical poems that do not spring from love, loss, longing, happiness, loneliness, grief or fear can even spring from a pen. That would be more like a disembodied, scientific dissertation … or something like that.
What do you hope a reader feels—not just thinks—after spending time with this book?
I would hope for them to experience some of what I experienced when I wrote them. Would love for the readers to go inside themselves and allow themselves to ask their own questions or maybe recognize some of the landing spots I discovered in the process of writing. I would love for them to feel inspired to go on their own journey of exploration of what lies under the surface of their own being and burst out in wonder when they discover the sweetness that lives inside them.
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Discover More Other Such Matters by multiple award-winning artist Fella Cederbaum—the fourth installment in her poetic legacy.
This thought-provoking collection invites you to journey inward. Her verses reach beyond the ordinary, capturing the essence of what it means to live authentically, love deeply, and rediscover the divine spark within. Within the pages of this powerful collection of deeply probing poetry, Fella explores themes of love, truth, feelings, societal challenges, and the art of staying present in the unfolding of human experience.
Through poems like “Before You Were You,” “Show Me Who You Are,” and “The Orchid and the Daisy,” she distills profound wisdom into elegant simplicity—offering readers moments of pause, reflection, and transformation.
Often described as a true Renaissance woman, she brings her relentless questions to inspire self-examination and introspection. More Other Such Matters is an intimate companion for the soul—perfect for reflection, meditation, or quiet contemplation. This latest collection continues to remind us to be grateful, to breathe, be still, and return home to our most authentic selves.
The versatile Fella Cederbaum has achieved success in many creative endeavors—as a poet, author, painter, independent filmmaker with nearly two dozen short films, and skilled composer and arranger. Her earlier writings, two volumes titled Of Life and Other Such Matters, Speech Acrobats, and her two poetry with music albums, Truth and Destiny and Speech Acrobats, have solidified her reputation as a versatile and accomplished artist. She has been exceptionally well-reviewed and described as “an artist who is brave enough to be an original.”
Cederbaum’s has received over 120 awards ranging from Best Short, to Best Soundtrack and Best Script. She has garnered not one, but two coveted IndieFest Humanitarian Awards.
More Other Such Matters
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
