Naomi Replansky

Replansky turned 100 in May 2018 and lived another four years, giving her last public reading on December 10th, 2022, less than a month before her death. She lived in New York City with her partner, Eva Kollisch (born 1925), a writer and long-time professor of comparative literature and women's studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

Replansky was born in the Bronx; she resided in Manhattan. Her Collected Poems won the Poetry Society of America's 2013 William Carlos Williams Award and was a finalist for the 2014 Poets' Prize. Replansky's poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, such as No More Masks!, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, and Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era. Her four books of poetry are:

She was also known for her translations from Yiddish and from the German of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Bertolt Brecht; Brecht's "Der Sumpf," set by composer Hanns Eisler as one of five "Hollywood Elegies," was long known only in her version ("The Swamp") until the original resurfaced among Peter Lorre's papers and was published in the 1997 Frankfurt edition. Her translation of Brecht's play, "St. Joan of the Stockyards" was performed off-Broadway by the Encounter Theater Company. She had been a guest teacher at Pitzer College. She gave readings in New York, Minneapolis and elsewhere, and had resided in Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Replansky's work has been featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.

The clarity and power of Replansky's work have been praised by such writers as David Ignatow, Marie Ponsot, Grace Paley, and Ursula K. Le Guin. George Oppen wrote of her in 1981: “Naomi Replansky must be counted among the most brilliant American poets. That she has not received adequate praise is one of the major mysteries of the world of poetry.” Booklist said of The Dangerous World, “with timeless grace, she sets each poem simmering with powerful phrasing and universal experience.... Replansky brings us ageless work in a collection that should not be missed.”

Ring Song, containing poems written from 1936 to 1952, was a finalist for the 1953 National Book Award. Of the following hiatus in publication, she says, “I write slowly.” The chapbook Twenty-One Poems contains versions of work contained in the other two collections. The Dangerous World contains forty-two new poems as well as twenty-five revised poems from Ring Song. The meticulousness of her work indicates a painstaking mind and an unusual degree of perfectionism in the craftsmanship of her poems. Though often small in scale, they are giant in meaning. Her Collected Poems include many unpublished works.

Naomi Replansky (born May 23, 1918–Jan 7, 2023) was an American poet.