A Roundup of Jewish Poetry Collections by Jewish Women
A renaissance in Jewish poetry by Jewish women, with a rich diversity of voices, is reflected in several exciting new and upcoming poetry collections that offer up salves, poems for healing in a broken world.
Poet Jessica Jacobs, whose latest book of poetry, Unalone: Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis (Four Way Books, $17.95), was published in March, founded Yetzirah, a national organization for Jewish poets, two years ago. This July, Yetzirah held its second conference in Asheville, North Carolina. “Jewish poetry,” Jacobs tells me, “is thriving and incredibly diverse, so if Yetzirah has a shadow mission besides supporting Jewish poetry, it’s welcoming as wide a range of Jewish poets and readers as possible.”
One of the conference’s keynote speakers, Lilith’s own poetry editor Alicia Suskin Ostriker, now 86 years old, the doyenne of contemporary Jewish poetry, has a new book of poetry, her 16th, (not including 4 chapbooks) published October 8, The Holy & Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time (Alice James Books, $24.95), a collection of poems written between 2020 and 2022. As she writes in the book’s opening poem, “Write if you can find words I tell myself write what you are / afraid to write / lay down your cards step over the lintel through that door: / Write or die.” These poems are the words of someone for whom writing is as essential to survival as air.
One thread in the new book is the passing of time, whether in Ostriker’s words, it is “aging, the approach of mortality,” as well as “the idea of plague, both covid and the ills of the body politic, a physical and moral plague that we have been living through.” In “Photo of a Young Woman,” she sees a young woman “pressing herself into her son” and writes, “I was that young woman / who adores that baby / whose breasts sing / hymns to that baby” and remembers being young lovers, “didn’t our young bodies press / and / sing very much like that.”
Ostriker’s poems in this collection reflect her stage of life. As she tells me, the poems are “more spare, less romantic, more attempting to get to the most basic reality of things.” In one, she pleads for the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of God, whom she addresses in several poems, to “help me believe / existence itself bliss / broken and we / alone required to mend it.” This plea underscores how she sees a duty to mend the world through her poetry. The book’s final poem, Coda, reads like a prayer for her poetry to repair the world: “Let my poems be shards of the holy and broken bliss / that circles and shackles the earth.” This is a wish for her poems to shackle the earth, a binding, or connecting together, not a shackling that imprisons. These shards evoke the Kabbalah story of God’s energy breaking the vessels at creation, with the vessels’ shards turning into our material world. “There’s poetry in the shards,” Ostriker tells me, and as this book shows, she finds poetry in the fractures of our fragmented world.
Echoing Ostriker’s imperative to “write or die,” poet Wendy Wisner writes in her new poetry collection, her third, The New Life, (Cornerstone Press, $19.95) published in September, “Blood and milk, blood and milk. How many lines can I write between the baby’s cries?” In her postpartum haze, writing poetry serves as a lifeline. Wisner writes about childhood, motherhood, and marriage in words that are viscous and visceral. Desire, both maternal (for her children) and sexual (for her husband), seeps in these sensuous poems. She writes of the physicality of motherhood, how her son “unfurled himself from my body, / like all the men I’ve loved,” and the feeling of “sweaty breast, goopy eyes, / pacing the bedroom in the middle of the night, / baby biting your shirt, your hair.” Several poems ooze with milk or blood: In Hunger, “When the milk lets down, I imagine my breasts are grapes bursting, or stars brought to light when the sky turns dark.”
Wisner also writes about the losses and trauma experienced by her grandmother and how these pass on to the next generation. In Nechama, her grandmother pulls out a box from under the bed, encasing a “tiny pink dress with a lace collar, pressed, wholly intact, like a museum artifact,” then slides the box “back under the bed, into its darkness.” The dress encased in the box is a synedoche for Jewish intergenerational trauma, hidden under the bed until talking, or writing about it, releases grief from its hiding places.
Poet Anna Goodman Herrick also writes about intergenerational trauma in her new collection, A Speaker is a Wilderness, Poems on the Sacred Path from Broken to Whole (Monkfish Book Publishing Company, $17.99); writing poetry allows her to transcend her own traumatic experiences. Like Ostriker she is concerned with mending, here with repairing her 14 year old self who survived sexual assault by a classmate: “Can I find / what ripped and mend it? If you are still stuck there, little one, I found you…”. Like Wisner, she addresses trauma suffered in the Holocaust. In But What If Generational Trauma *Is* Generational Wisdom she speaks to her mother, using the second person “you” to refer to herself, “You confess you carry a sadness / and you don’t know why. She tells you / about survival – your grandmother / in Auschwitz death camp with her sisters, / their parents murdered on their first day.” Like Wisner’s poem about her grandmother pulling out from under the bed her dead sister’s dress, conveying this trauma in poetry provides release: “For a moment you can breathe. The sadness hovers / outside of you.”
Tikva Hecht, the daughter and granddaughter of Orthodox rabbis, released her first collection in September, Tashlikh (Ben Yehuda Press), a beautiful collage of poems concerned with longing, for the divine and for the body. She writes, “I want to bind our longing into sheaves and call it prayer and call it poetry and call god to give testimony on our behalves and together half listen,” suggesting the line between poetry and prayer is a thin, and fluid, one.
Frequent Lilith contributor and subject Joy Ladin also has a new book of poetry, Family, out this fall (Persea Books, $17.00). In a series of poignant poems, she addresses her growing illness, her child’s alienation from her, and her mother’s dying days, reflecting on their fraught relationship, but finding solace in the pain: “I knew you were dying / and you knew I was there, / and so was love, / yours and mine, / tangled like fingers together.”
Poetry comes from suffering but allows us to transcend it, to make the sadness hover outside of ourselves. As Goodman Herrick writes in one poem, “your tears / yes will salt your wounds for a while we have all / been torn open by each other let yourself come be the wound / opening you will embrace the world this way.” Her words echo Ostriker’s, who writes in one poem, “for poets thrive on disaster / born as we are within the wound.” These poets write from the wound, where we are most vulnerable. We all have wounds right now. These new poetry collections, with all their variations, are, to use Ostriker’s words, “shards that circle,” that heal this fractured earth. Writing, and reading, these poems, is tikkun olam, an act of restoring and repairing the world.
Laura Hodes is a writer and poet who lives in the Chicago area. Her arts criticism has appeared in the Forward and other publications.
