Poetic Prosthetics

Ron Ben-Tovim is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University. He was a Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellow and won the Dan David Prize for Postdoctoral Research in 2017. He works on the intersection of war writing, trauma studies and disability studies and is the author of Poetic Prosthetics: Trauma and Language in Contemporary Veteran Writing (2022).

• Introduction: Limping Back to Life after WarIndex, Ghost, Dream Reality, Disillusionment, Play War Life, Life as War Prosthetic Irony: The Ghost in the MachineThe Prosthesis and Burial, Or Caring for the DeadBody and MetaphorConclusion: Leaving the Island

Ron Ben-Tovim’s book is a penetrating inquiry into the poems of soldiers as seen through the mutually reinforcing lenses of trauma and disability studies. Particularly arresting is his idea of the poem as a prosthetic work of art that may enable the psychically wounded to make their arduous way back into social and political life.