Nefesh Margarina by Tzur Gueta

It’s easy to categorize Tzur Guetta according to identity politics. Young poet? Check. Mizrahi? Check. From the periphery? Check. Gay? Check. Secular? Check. A Tel Avivian now? Check. From this angle, everything seems predictable. But how far removed are these categories from the core, which is anything but clichéd: “Nefesh Margarina” is a unique debut book, striking in its intensity.

“Life,” Guetta writes in the poem “Acherit,” which opens the book, “passes over me with longing / for those who are still here,” giving us a key to the general register of his work: a vague yearning, sober sadness, and a kind of principled delicacy that pervades everything. The “margarine boy” of his past gazes at his childhood and youth without nostalgia, but with compassion and wisdom.

Tzur Gueta physically and mentally returns to the city of his childhood (“like the snake’s shed skin – but in reverse. / The next station: Nahariya”), encountering his parents, his rabbi-teachers (“Tzur in gematria equals: bulbul ank. And also: eucalyptus,” he writes in parody of the gematria fondness of his childhood rabbis), and his beloved, illustrious grandmother Persiada. He also recalls times when “the homophobic creature looked me in the eyes and said: / You are gay.” But first and foremost, he meets his own soul in its becoming, and his body which “crosses with his soul the street. / He is the young man, / and she is his grandmother.”

Far from any cliché or identity politics, the book “Nefesh Margarina” deserves to be read for what it is: a fresh, challenging creation from a true poet. Dori Manor, the book’s editor.

Tzur Gueta was born in 1992 and lives in Tel Aviv. His poems have been published in leading newspapers and journals. “Nefesh Margarina” is his first poetry book.