Book Review

Jamie Wendt on
poems by Jessica Jacobs
Four Way Books, 2024

           

The wondrous, awe-inspiring, and at times frightful stories of the Torah have inspired writers for centuries. Poet and founder of the nonprofit literary organization Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, Jessica Jacobs has entered into a conversation with our matriarchs and patriarchs in her new poetry collection unalone. Organized into twelve sections, like the book of Genesis, her poems follow biblical characters in a poetic, contemporary Midrash (a midrash is an ancient commentary on the Hebrew scriptures). Each section of Jacobs’ book is titled with the names of the “Parshiyot,” or portions, of Genesis and correspond to the images and specific moments that readers of the Torah will encounter in those sections, ranging from the days of creation, to the Tower of Babel, Noah and the flood, and Abraham and Sarah and their descendants, whose concerns range from hospitality and barrenness to loneliness and violence. 

This collection opens with the poem “Stepping through the Gate,” which begins with the line, “Make a fence, said the rabbis, around the Torah,” which traditionally is understood as a means of protection, of guarding the holy Torah and keeping it at the center of Jewish peoples’ lives and preserving the core values of Judaism. Near the end of the poem, Jacobs writes, “Let every fence in my mind have a gate. / With an easy latch and well-oiled hinges.” Like much of unalone, Jacobs takes a traditional understanding of a topic or story and finds a way to open a new “gate” to provide a personal and contemporary perspective. 

The speaker of Jacobs’ poems addresses and comments on the concerns and experiences of biblical ancestors, while finding ways to view them anew and empathize with their losses and heartache. At times didactic and at other times reflective and comparative, Jacobs’ poems hold the stories of the Torah up to our current moment as well as the speakers’ relationships with her mother, sister, lover, and God. Some poems, such as “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her,” are titled using lines directly translated from the Torah. This poem invokes the love the speaker feels for her lover when writing about the patriarch Jacob’s love for his wife Rachel. Some poems, such as “No one’s loves, no one’s wives,” give voice to women who are silenced in the Torah – in this case, Bilhah and Zilpah, Jacob’s concubines. 

In the poem “Will not the Judge of the Earth do justice?”, Jacobs describes a conversation between the speaker and her sister, who is a new mom and expresses an understanding for a woman who wrestled an alligator in the Everglades to free her son from being its prey. Jacobs threads this moment alongside a description of fire raining down on Sodom and how Lot’s wife would look back no matter what anyone said, as two of her daughters were still trapped in that city.
 


. . . When they passed

in the tent, Isaac rubbed a remembered ache 
in his shoulder and never again held

his father’s eye. Sarah, smelling the imagined
ashes on her husband’s fingers, the blood

in the crease of his throat, turned from him
in the night.         
                                ~Jessica Jacobs, unalone


From Jacobs’ vantage point, important figures like Sarah are brought to life in a new way. By highlighting not simply Sarah’s joy, laughter, and shock at becoming pregnant at an elderly age, Jacobs considers how the near sacrifice of Sarah’s beloved son Isaac must have impacted the relationship between Sarah and Abraham. Jacobs writes about the extreme grief Sarah must have felt after thinking that Abraham was taking Isaac to be sacrificed. In the poem “Why There is No Hebrew Word for Obey,” the speaker imagines the uncomfortable tension and lack of trust Sarah most likely experienced for the rest of her life. Jacobs writes:

. . . When they passed

in the tent, Isaac rubbed a remembered ache 
in his shoulder and never again held

his father’s eye. Sarah, smelling the imagined
ashes on her husband’s fingers, the blood

in the crease of his throat, turned from him
in the night. 

This poem, like other poems in the collection, shifts from a biblical event to a moment of contemporary trauma or realization as she continues this poem. Jacobs references the massacre at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg in 2018. On that Shabbat, the congregation was reading the story of the binding of Isaac “…when a man burning / with unquestioning belief / entered with a gun and, with no better angel / to stay his hand, opened fire . . .” Jacobs ends the poem with an urge for humanity to listen to each other. 

Throughout the collection, there are a handful of poems titled, “And God Speaks.” Most of these poems are written in couplets, but in some of the poems with this title, the layout of the words on the page is a shape poem. In the “And God Speaks” poem in the section Noach, the poem is curved like a crescent moon, which also looks like a wave or a rainbow connected to the covenant God made with Noah to restore the earth. In “And God Speaks” in the section Vayishlach, the shape of the poem imitates the shape of an eye, connecting to the content of the poem, which is inspired by a quote from Genesis about Jacob seeing God face to face and having his life preserved. 

Spirituality and tenderness weave through all of Jacobs’ poems as she considers how to let the Torah shed light on the speaker’s life. In “Elegy in Prophetic Perfect,” after describing how Joseph had visions of what was to come, Jacobs’ writes:

. . . A vision
of the future so certain

it’s already past. Like my mother,
decades before

she would forget her own name
or the fact she’d had children, saying,

You’ll miss me when I’m gone. 

unalone concludes with an extensive “Notes” section along with a select bibliography and gracious acknowledgments. To begin the “Notes,” Jacobs writes, “In Jewish study, there is a tradition of not just citing your sources but also naming your teachers, as well as the teachers of those teachers, recognizing and raising up the names of those whose wisdom shaped you and reaffirming that God alone creates something from nothing.” Jacobs emulates this tradition throughout her poems in the book, as she often includes translations from lines in the Torah and Hebrew words to address her inspiration. 

This creative, original interpretation of Genesis ultimately helps the reader examine these classic stories anew and reflect on how they can inform our contemporary lives. 

Jamie Wendt is the author of the poetry collection Fruit of the Earth (Main Street Rag, 2018), which won the 2019 National Federation of Press Women Book Award in Poetry. Her manuscript, Laughing in Yiddish, was a finalist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. Her poems and essays have been published in various literary journals and anthologies, including Feminine Rising, Green Mountains Review, Lilith, Jet Fuel Review, the Forward, Poetica Magazine, and others. She contributes book reviews to the Jewish Book Council as well as to other publications. She received a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention and was nominated for Best Spiritual Literature. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha. She is a middle school Humanities teacher and lives in Chicago with her husband and two kids. 



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