More Other Such Matters

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Dustin Villars

Fella Cederbaum has been asking the same questions for decades, just from deeper down each time. The fourth installment in her poetic legacy, More Other Such Matters picks up where the earlier volumes left off and immediately makes clear that the inquiry has not lost any of its urgency. If anything it has sharpened. The poems here circle identity, love, mortality, and truth with the particular intensity of a mind that has grown suspicious of every answer it previously trusted.

That suspicion is the book's animating spirit and its greatest gift to the reader. Cederbaum is not interested in declarations, which she describes as rigid and ultimately incompatible with life itself. She is interested in the outer layers that declarations mistake for bedrock, and in what lies beneath them, and in what lies beneath that. Each poem peels back another layer with a combination of wry observation and sudden confession that keeps you genuinely off-balance in the way that honest poetry always does.

What makes this collection feel genuinely distinctive is how fully Cederbaum's multidisciplinary life informs the work. She has made nearly two dozen short films, composed music, painted, performed. The cinematic pacing that reviewers keep noting in her poetry is not a borrowed quality. It is native to someone who has spent decades thinking about how images and sound and silence create meaning simultaneously. The poems move with that same orchestrated intention, and the companion poetry film she released alongside this collection makes the connection between her different artistic practices explicit and illuminating.

The strongest poems function as miniature essays delivered in a voice that pivots without warning from philosophical distance to intimate confession, then turns and asks the reader a direct question before they have fully recovered from the previous turn. That destabilization is not carelessness. It is the method.

For readers willing to sit with questions rather than reach for answers, this collection is exactly the kind of company that makes the sitting feel worthwhile.

About the Author

Fella Cederbaum

Fella Cederbaum is the writer/director of 24 short films that feature her poetry, art and music. Her films, starring MahnoDahno and MahniDahni, have been screened internationally. She has been highly awarded, not only for her films, but also for her scripts, soundtracks and visuals. One of her paintings was featured at the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Germany.

Cederbaum grew up in Germany, England and Israel, where she attended Hebrew University. After graduating she worked as the deputy director of the Israel Chamber Orchestra. 

Fella’s poetry and music were presented weekly on WABC Radio. Her song, Dance With Me, performed by international Grammy-Winning musicians, is featured on the album Touched By Love. Fella’s debut album, Truth And Destiny, was released in 2021, followed by her second album Speech Acrobats.

Fella has been exceptionally well-reviewed and described as a "Renaissance woman, an artist who is brave enough to be an original.”