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Wilhelmina Gottschalk

“Shabbat arrives as usual,
dressed in silk
with her hair and make-up
beautifully arranged.”

So begins The Sabbath Bee by Wilhelmina Gottschalk, which updates the millenia-old genre of Jewish Sabbath poetry for today's world.

“Torah, say our sages, has seventy faces. As these prose poems reveal, so too does Shabbat. Here we meet Shabbat as familiar housemate, as the child whose presence transforms a family (sometimes in ways that outsiders can’t understand), as a spreading tree, as an annoying friend who insists on being celebrated, as a child throwing water balloons, as a woman, as a man, as a bee, as the ocean… Through the lens of these deft, surprising, moving prose poems, all seventy of Shabbat’s faces shine.”

—Rachel Barenblat, author, The Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah and Texts to the Holy

Ben Yehuda Press

The Jewish Poetry Project

The Sabbath Bee: Love Songs to Shabbat

Robert H. Deluty

I will miss his teachers’ disciplinary notes,
So artfully phrased and painstakingly inoffensive

Robert H. Deluty again masterfully weaves together the inside and outside of family matters and other relationships essential to our lives and upbringing – in this case, personal and public aspects of being a parent, teacher, doctor or a child, student, patient. Senryus separate and link Deluty’s meditations on how and to what extent educating can be healing for the individual soul and for generations to come.

"Michael Dylan Welch once quipped that, 'if haiku is a finger pointing at the moon, senryu is a finger poking you—or someone else—in the ribs.' In his wonderful new collection of senryu and longer poems, Robert Deluty manages to capture both the humor and pathos of these always fraught relationships—parent/child, teacher/student, doctor/patient—as in this senryu: Rose Cohen asking/ her forty-year-old gay son/ if it's a phase. In each of his poems, Deluty delivers what R. H. Blyth called, 'moments of vision into, not the nature of things, but the nature of man...as in a flash of lightning.'"

—Ronald W. Pies, M.D., author of The Unmoved Mover and The Levtov Trilogy.

"Robert Deluty's poetry shows why parents, teachers, and doctors need to be careful, observant, and vigilant about how they process the world. For they give and receive in ways that should help children, students, and patients to grow - to make their lives better for themselves and for us all. With poignancy, humor, and wisdom, Deluty draws out our innermost feelings and thoughts so that we may become truer to ourselves and others."

—Joseph L. DeVitis, Ph.D., editor of The Future of American Higher Education: How Today's Public Intellectuals Frame the Debate

"Robert Deluty's new book serves up in abundance the keenly observant humor we have come to expect, springing from the inherent comedy of the human condition and viewed invariably through the lens of his tender compassion. Likewise, he empathizes with the vulnerability and grief we encounter in others and ourselves. We are fully human, after all, only in our mixed-up connections with each other. Like the six-year-old in one of Deluty's senryu, who fills in the boxes of a crossword puzzle with tiny hearts, this book inserts love at every opportunity."

—George H. Northrup, Ph.D., author of Wave into Wave, Light into Light: Poems and Places

Parent/Child, Teacher/Student, Doctor/Patient: New and Selected Poems

Andrew Burt

While the poems in this collection are inspired by the story of Fievel Mousekewitz, the cartoon mouse of the author’s childhood, they are gut-wrenching in their examination of the American dream. Fievel’s family history—and the author’s—is one of a Jewish family immigrating from the Old World to the New and eventually being pulled across the plains: “When migrant boys looked west in leather hats, their slang pierced with Polish accents.” Even though “tomorrow is made of rocks and time; is the draft that sweeps sleepily through the fallen branches,” it is also where immigrants “watch their dreams decompose on plywood” as they search “for whatever it is that makes men free.”

Using the story of Fievel, Burt plays masterfully with the ambivalence of hope and cynicism, as if he had traversed the ocean and the continent westwards himself: “I am the hope that has not been forgotten, because I declare myself welcome here, as if there is nothing in history I will not make mine.”

“Andrew Burt's poetry magnifies the vanishingly small line between danger and safety. This collection asks whether order is an illusion that veils chaos, or vice-versa, travelling the world and bridging time and tone, juxtaposing images from the Bible with animated films. The poems search for answers—from nature, from dreams, from human connection—and often conclude that the only answer is to surrender to forces beyond anyone’s control . . . I stopped underlining lines in this poetry collection when I realized that I was underlining every page.”

—Ari Shapiro, host of NPR's All Things Considered

“Andrew Burt’s Poems for a Cartoon Mouse gives voice to the underside of the American-Jewish symbiosis in a light and playful style, worthy of Ecclesiastes. His poetry softens no edges, sweetens no puzzles, dispels no darkness, and yet it dazzles.”

—Rabbi James E. Ponet, Howard M. Holtzmann Jewish Chaplain, Emeritus, Yale University

Poems for a Cartoon Mouse

R. B. Lemberg

R.B. Lemberg's poems are a manifesto of memories, unearthing worlds that are gone and poignantly present: their childhood in the Soviet Union, suspended between Ukraine and the permafrost of Siberia, among the traumatized, silent, persecuted members of their Jewish family; Lemberg's coming of age in Israel, being the other wherever they go, both internally and externally, in multiple identities, languages, genders; and the arrival in "the lost land" of their America, where they have put down "tentative roots."

Every line in this stunning, lyrical memoir is chiseled with the poignant precision of ice into a coruscating cascade that engulfs us with the author's sensations of solitude, anger, grief; sometimes hurling like an avalanche, sometimes tenderly unfolding like constellations in a circumpolar sky - leaving open the possibility that with the disturbing truths covered for decades, the thawing permafrost from Lemberg's past might also lay bare layers of love.

Everything Thaws: A Poetic Cycle

Rhonda Rosenheck

"Rhonda Rosenheck has done the impossible. By using limericks and embracing their irreverent tone, she has created a biblical commentary that is truly unique. Each chapter of the Torah is distilled into its own limerick, leading the reader to reconsider the meaning of the original text, and opening avenues for interpretation that are both fun and insightful. Rhonda Rosenheck knows the Hebrew Bible, and she knows that it can stand up to the sometimes silly, sometimes snarky, but always insightful scholarship packed into each one of these interpretive jewels."

—-Rabbi Hillel Norry

1.

From chaos began the creation,

Each flora and fauna its station.

The water and sky,

The earth they wind by,

Last Adam, who had to be patient.

The Five Books of Limericks: A chapter-by-chapter retelling of the Torah

Shawn C. Harris

The story starts at a Jewish funeral.

fist after fist fills with cool damp earth

It travels to Israel:

at ben-gurion airport
here she comes hauling her baggage
rendered clumsy by her burden
beneath that smooth brown skin
that halo of thick coarse hair
the plantation and the shtetl
live in blood and memory

her passport names her
tirzah persephone horowitz
after an aunt on her dad’s side
who died so young in the camps
and her mother’s favorite greek myth
but to call her tirzah is too much
like uncovering her nakedness
like speaking aloud the holy name

and the holy city of Tzfat…

i am a city of song
plucked strings of a lyre
loud brassy klezmer
throbbing techno beats
shoes clop-clopping on cobblestone
tires screeching on the asphalt river
winding round my peak

It features monsters…

terry loves monsters
loved them since her first pimples and pubes
sneaking dracula under the covers
wondering what it would be like
to feel a vampire’s fangs on her neck
to taste human blood in her mouth
to transform into wolf or bat or mist
but dracula always dies
staked and beheaded by good christian men
because magic and mystery must not survive

And it ends…

No. That would be telling.

The Red Door: A dark fairy tale told in poems

Rodger Kamenetz

Kamenetz's poems whirl and shake on the page. He is the poet of the living history of unspeakable names and his book...sings with dark wit the tales of tough family spirits.

—Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and The Night Watchman.

These are very exciting and original poems...a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew.

—Yehuda Amichai, author of A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994 and Open Closed Open: Poems

The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022

Abe Mezrich

Abe Mezrich breathes new life into the first third of the Torah in this book of poetic midrash.

"It would have been enough if Abe Mezrich only wrote midrashim (creative re-interpretations/rediscoveries of the Torah); it would have been enough if he only wrote poems; it would have been enough if he only wrote Zen koans. How fortunate are we that he has given us a work combines all three! Mezrich is a cultivated craftsman—interpretively astute, sonically deliberate, and spiritually cunning."

—Zohar Atkins, author of Nineveh

"Direct and accessible, Mezrich's midrashic poems often tease profound meaning out of his chosen Torah texts."

—Yehoshua November, author of God's Optimism

"Abe Mezrich cuts straight back to the roots of the Midrashic tradition, sermonizing as a poet, rather than ideologue. Best of all, Abe knows how to ask questions and avoid the obvious answers."

—Jake Marmer, author of Cosmic Diaspora

"Each installment of Abe's still small voice is a miniature jewel, poetically illuminating with its delicate facets otherwise hidden elements of each parsha."

—Dan Friedman, managing editor, The Forward

"According to the mystics, the Torah was engraved with black fire on white fire. These poetic midrash too. Read them slowly. Spend time in the white spaces. Let the foreignness of the text resonate in silence, and find yourself rewarded."

—Jay Michaelson, author of The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path

Words for a Dazzling Firmament: Poems / Readings on Bereshit Through Shemot

Yaakov Moshe

This book's heretical prayers, Dharma aphorisms, neo-Hasidic koans, and unorthodox blessings for unexpected occasions asks the question of what it means to live as a human in a world infused by the sacred, the profane, and the magical.

Is: Heretical Jewish blessings and poems

Rachel Barenblat

This volume of contemporary liturgical poetry is both a poetry collection and an aid to devotional prayer. Open My Lips dips into the deep well of Jewish tradition and brings forth renewed and renewing adaptations of, and riffs on, classical Jewish liturgy. Here are poems for weekday and Shabbat, festival seasons (including the Days of Awe and Passover), and psalms of grief and praise. Open My Lips offers a clear, readable, heartfelt point of access into the Jewish tradition and into prayer in general.

Those who wish to begin a prayer practice in English but don't know where to start will find this volume offers several starting points. These poems could be used to augment an existing prayer practice, Jewish or otherwise ­- either on a solitary basis or for congregational use. For the reader of poetry unfamiliar with liturgical text, they can serve as an introduction to prayer in general, and Jewish prayer in particular. And for the pray-er unfamiliar with contemporary poetry, these poems can open the door in the other direction.

Open My Lips: Prayers and Poems

Rachel Kann

"Rachel Kann is such a blessing; this collection is such a blessing. These poems are cosmic and earthy, sacred and fierce and alive and so deeply inspiring, so deeply empowering. I can breathe more fully after reading these poems. I feel like I could fly after reading these poems. These gorgeous, glorious poems are yes and yes and yes and yes."

—Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis and The Selfless Bliss of the Body

"Rachel Kann is a master wordsmith. Her poems are rich in content, packed with life's wisdom and imbued with soul. May this collection of her work enable more of the world to enjoy her offerings."

—Sarah Yehudit Schneider, author of You Are What You Hate and Kabbalistic Writings on the Nature of Masculine and Feminine

How to Bless the New Moon: Songs of the Sovereign and the Icon

Julia Knobloch

In BOOK OF FAILED SALVATION, her second collection, poet and rabbi-in-training Julia Knobloch chronicles a relationship that spanned continents before coming to an end. In these poems, complicated Jewish histories intertwine with a yearning for consolation, while prophets dance and cypresses tower into the sky. Knobloch's exploration of loneliness resonates with our own losses, and her questions about creating our salvation are rays of light illuminating life from unexpected angles.

"In these intensely felt and exquisitely wrought poems, the focus on love, loss of love and the personal journey opens profound perceptions through language steeped in both the sacred and profane. While concretely personal, the poems insist on their location in nature, history, and tradition. 'What's unplanned can seem prophetic, ' the poet writes in musical lines that reflect the movement made by an exploratory mind as it examines its own feelings and insights, and in the process creates poems that surprise and excite."

— Linda Stern Zisquit, author, Havoc: New and Selected Poems

"The beautiful poems in Julia Knobloch's Book of Failed Salvation express a tender longing for spiritual, physical, and emotional connection. They detail a life in movement-across distances, faith, love, and doubt. The poems vividly evoke the lived experience of a number of places, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, and Los Angeles, each landscape always changing like the restless speaker who seeks a knowledge and an experience of what the poems unapologetically call 'salvation.' "

— David Caplan, author, Into My Garden

Book of Failed Salvation: Poems

Pinny Bulman

he swam way out past the shadows cast / by the steel towers of the indifferent gray bridge / shielding the traffic flowing rhythmically back and / forth, far above the little dead lighthouse that stopped working long / ago when there was nothing left down there / that anyone still wanted to see.

Pinny Bulman's poems chronicle his coming of age as a young religious Jewish man against the backdrop of the Dominican and Puerto Rican culture in Washington Heights - two worlds that co-exist but rarely overlap. As he moves beyond the past while holding on to it, Bulman creates the presence of people, prayers, and places long gone, in the same way "time could turn loss into patina." Bulman's precise language allows him to conjure up poignant moments without running the risk of becoming overtly sentimental: but in the end when things melt / what we're left with are these carved out spaces / each with its own beauty of absence.

Old Shul: Poems

Lori Levy

What more could I ask for than a chair at your bright yellow table, high as clear skies, pine trees, and the dusty red roofs of Jerusalem.

Lori Levy's delicate poems oscillate vividly between the sensation of dayenu-moments, when we feel perfectly whole and at peace -and our craving to experience more: more of this life, again, more of this place, or another place, of another moment. Levy merges nostalgia and carpe diem as she recalls important stations of her journeys between Vermont, Israel, and California. To love means to know well: a person, a place, a specific shade of light at a precise hour of the day, the taste of her mother-in-law's kubeh dish. As we follow Levy's memories of her longings, joys, and loves we are reminded of how we can find permanence in every impermanent moment, savored in the present.

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