Rooted in a Jewish family history that reaches into 19th-century Ottoman Palestine, "Self-Portrait as Ruth" is written in defiance of all official versions of Israeli or Palestinian history. A challenging, aching, honest exploration of culpability, this lament will incite controversy and debate. These poems are interrogations of the first-person possessive of claims, both singular and plural, to land, to identity, to history, and to the body and of wounds and victimization, both unique and collective."