THROUGH THE AMBER, poetry by Babo Kamel

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 98 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-41-3

As amber traps the bodies of ancient life, poet Babo Kamel preserves her memories in glimpses of family, parents, and old loves. “Can you hear the crow’s eternal laugh bending time?” She tells of her grandmother’s flight from pogroms and persecution, continues with stories of her parents, homage to her father’s painting, and how she is haunted by her mother’s death decades later. Lastly, Kamel allows us a look into her own life and memories including her first experience of death and loss. Shaded by the color blue – “Not the taken for granted blue of Florida skies,” “or the ink of love letters faint on aerogramme paper” – this work takes you deep into loss. Yet you emerge hopeful that memory, like amber, can gift you with the past.

Praise for Babo Kamel & Through the Amber

This incandescent lyric blessing of a book is Babo Kamel’s ode to family, the living and the dead, her love song of survival in diaspora—a song vital in these challenging times. In Through the Amber, Babo Kamel shows us a child born of a shtetl erased years before—a refugee of an inherited story who grew to carry the memory of aunts who die and friends who disappear, to mourn the dead who don’t know they’re dead. A displaced child who learned not to say she was a Jew, who hid from herself even when she looked in the mirror. A child who grew to write poems her artist father once told her held hundreds of paintings. And these poems do. They do. Babo Kamel’s masterful poems paint a life as indelible in memory as your own. I am grateful for these poems and for this poet.

—rose auslander, author of Wild Water Child

Babo Kamel’s dead may be securely fastened inside an amber gemstone, but they often visit, “riding currents, then circling back.” Piercing the amber, the poet releases the complex lives of her dead who sweep back and forth like “melody rising from the crimson ground.” These particular lives, enmeshed in a particular time and history, become “intimate as breath.” I was swept away by the painterly beauty, living depths, and sheer reach of this enthralling collection.

—Patricia Corbus, author of Ashes, Jade, Mirrors & others

As you move Through the Amber you will find you have entered another consciousness, and you will draw long breaths at the events unfolding, the ordinary and the surprising. You’ll be aware of the weight of the living and the beauty of the familiar. What we see and understand in the daily gathers mystery and solidity, and you will pause to re-see and re-think familiar experience. These are poems rich with family and presence, given us by the keen eye and wise heart of the poet, her past alive in her present, and they will become yours: a line, a gesture, a yellow scarf, the angle as you ascend a particular hill, or climb a local mountain. Babo Kamel’s work draws on a rich apprehension of the ordinary and is intersected by the rare; as the poems unfold, they render the dead and the living, we feel the weight of life and the vast volume of emptiness that goes on forever. These are poems made from the ordinary, and like our lives, they are rich with surprise and wisdom, poems dressed in the familiar ordinary of the daily, and rich with the unforgettable.

—Deena Linett, author of When I Was Water

Through the Amber is a collection of poems that paints a portrait of generational relationships, emotional attachments, and enduring memories that disturb and comfort. From many perspectives, and in vivid detail, these poems explore the co-existence of the dead and the living who inhabit our lives. How dreams and real places shape our perceptions and fine-tune our sensory appreciation. Like an amulet made of deeply earthen amber, a most historic gem material, Through the Amber pays faithful homage to life’s true measure - its collection and recollection, attentiveness to everyday and grand significance.

—K. Alma Peterson, author of two collections of poetry & a forthcoming chapbook

About the Author

As a dual citizen, Babo Kamel resides in Montreal, Quebec and Gorham, Maine. Kamel’s work appears in the Greensboro Review, Lily, Poet Lore, The Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry 2020 among others. She is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, and a Best of Net nominee. Her chapbook After is published with Finishing Line Press. Her full-length poetry collection What The Days Wanted is published with Broadstone Books. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers.