Fein, Richard: The Polish Dream Machine

Box Turtle Press, paperback

Publication Date: November 1, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

“I had to go to the hospital to give birth,” the poet states. When the book emerges, it is
wild. The Polish Dream Machine is marked by the incredible candor Richard Fein is
famous for. He tells us his life, what others bore, and with eloquence and wit defeats the loneliness of old age.

These are exquisite poems about old age. In “My Doras,” he conflates Dora Diamond
from Freshman English at Brooklyn College with Kafka’s last girlfriend, Dora Dymant,
and he goes to her medical appointments with her and she goes to his, and he tells how they had slipped away, when they were both counsellors at camp in the Poconos, “to the forest, or that nearby town, to make love”, until the final stanza, where he visits the cemetery in Prague with Helen, his wife: “where you had thrown yourself on the grave when Kafka was buried,/and now you tell me what it was like to be with him/even as we are married now, we two old people/ who read together and fondle each other’s body at night—/the flabs, and creases, and moles, and little growths.”

He loses a classmate, Irving Levine, who disappeared (“not by moving away but just by
not being at all”) and stuck with him all his life. “And I am now not far from ending up
where Irving did. . . .Irving. . ./Irving—my street address here in Cambridge,”

Richard Fein is 95. His poems in The Polish Dream Machine bring beauty to the terrors
of old age.” They are quintessential meditations on identity, love lost, and time gone
by—all related with the withering wisdom of old age. They are as candid and revealing
as the old French salesman’s screech, from which, Fein tells us, “this is how the Jew in
me emerged.”