Rachel R. Baum’s chapbook, Secrets she has saved, unwraps her maternal and filial relationships—as granddaughter, daughter, and mother—in poems evoking quotidian images and sounds that otherwise would mask these etched and slipping-away yearnings. With the poet, I found myself reaching to forgive.
—Rhonda Rosenheck, editor of Thriving: An Anthology, Sin No More, and Looking
In this quietly devastating short collection, Rachel Baum manages to convey an entire family in all its anguished ambivalence. Tolstoy may be right about happy families, but I recognize this unhappy family as if it were my own. Wry and occasionally funny, the poems skewer not only the speaker’s parents but herself and gesture toward the generations before and after, delineating how family dysfunction replicates itself. Baum covers an impressive amount of ground in these fourteen short, readable poems, as if she’d compressed an entire novel into a slim chapbook. The imagery is sharp and surprising; the voice both jaded and sensitive, belying the speaker’s tough stance. There is hard-gained wisdom by the end, and a kind of heartbreaking sadness throughout that reveals itself, finally, as love.
—Barbara Ungar, author of Naming the Animals and Immortal Medusa
Rachel Baum’s Secrets she has saved depicts a Jewish family over time and especially the connections and failed connections between mother and daughter. In these poignant poems, which take a variety of forms and are linked by repeated words and haunted by silences, Baum is intent on a rare kind of truth-telling about family life. Nor does she spare herself from judgment as she shows us the pain of a family with inherited trauma that is not spoken and therefore cannot be healed.
—Susan Kress, author of Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Feminist in a Tenured Position
Title: Secrets she has saved
Author: Rachel R. Baum
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - March
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 28
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-214-9
Rachel R. Baum’s chapbook, Secrets she has saved, unwraps her maternal and filial relationships—as granddaughter, daughter, and mother—in poems evoking quotidian images and sounds that otherwise would mask these etched and slipping-away yearnings. With the poet, I found myself reaching to forgive.
—Rhonda Rosenheck, editor of Thriving: An Anthology, Sin No More, and Looking
In this quietly devastating short collection, Rachel Baum manages to convey an entire family in all its anguished ambivalence. Tolstoy may be right about happy families, but I recognize this unhappy family as if it were my own. Wry and occasionally funny, the poems skewer not only the speaker’s parents but herself and gesture toward the generations before and after, delineating how family dysfunction replicates itself. Baum covers an impressive amount of ground in these fourteen short, readable poems, as if she’d compressed an entire novel into a slim chapbook. The imagery is sharp and surprising; the voice both jaded and sensitive, belying the speaker’s tough stance. There is hard-gained wisdom by the end, and a kind of heartbreaking sadness throughout that reveals itself, finally, as love.
—Barbara Ungar, author of Naming the Animals and Immortal Medusa
Rachel Baum’s Secrets she has saved depicts a Jewish family over time and especially the connections and failed connections between mother and daughter. In these poignant poems, which take a variety of forms and are linked by repeated words and haunted by silences, Baum is intent on a rare kind of truth-telling about family life. Nor does she spare herself from judgment as she shows us the pain of a family with inherited trauma that is not spoken and therefore cannot be healed.
—Susan Kress, author of Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Feminist in a Tenured Position
Title: Secrets she has saved
Author: Rachel R. Baum
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - March
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 28
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-214-9
