• Shortlisted for the 2021 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award
• Shortlisted for the 2023 Betty Averbach Foundation Prize for Poetry
• Shortlisted for the 2021 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book
• Longlisted for the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
• Longlisted for the 2021 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry
• Finalist for the 2022 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry

Tamar Rubin grew up immersed in Hebrew, Jewish traditions and texts, in a secular household, the daughter of an immigrant mother. In becoming a physician, she learned yet another language: medicine.

The poetry in Tablet Fragments, Rubin’s first published collection, weaves between the texts of all her learning, deploying evocative biblical mythopoetics and the precision of medical science.

Writing as a diagnostic eyewitness to the complexities of her life, Rubin explores the natural history of familial and romantic relationships, the impacting of migration and displacement, and her composite identities as outsider and insider; as doctor and her own body; as daughter, lover, mother and poet.

Home Archeology

Within this house, words
for things we own: spatula,
womb chair, driveway. Terms I know

look good on display.

Museum or mausoleum. Inside, we
decorate ravenously, sustain succulents,
lampshades, blandly
say nothing.

You make the supper, Moroccan
pomegranate, fall off the bone
beef. We eat

straight out of that orange tagine
from our wedding, and its skeletal
memory.

We thrash out dishes, laundry, utility
bills. But I don’t say anything, really.
Yesterday was my turn to talk

with the therapist. Dig, she said.
I try to play

archaeologist, excavate awful
relics inside me:

spyglass, school desk, a first print
of Tolstoy.

But my mouth is all cushions,
and carpets – words, and material clutter
strangle me.