How do con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish poets find a lan­guage that alludes to Jew­ish sacred texts while also retain­ing a vocab­u­lary and style that strike today’s read­ers as fresh and imme­di­ate? Enter per­former, film­mak­er, and poet Anna Good­man Her­rick, who brings to her slim col­lec­tion a deep knowl­edge of Jew­ish top­ics and a bold, imag­i­na­tive palette.

Work­ing pri­mar­i­ly in free verse, Her­rick plunges the read­er imme­di­ate­ly into a dra­mat­ic, heart-rend­ing account of a per­son­al tragedy — the death of her broth­er — and at the same time wraps these scenes in midrash. The read­er is then shown a series of trau­mat­ic child­hood and ado­les­cence mem­o­ries. One poem melds a sub­tly ter­ri­fy­ing scene of sex­u­al abuse with the sto­ry of Dinah:

At thir­teen, my age holds a year
for each child of Ya’akov who is named,
count­ing the daughter

דִינָה֙ בַּת־לֵאָ֔ה
Dinah Daugh­ter-of-Leah,

and nowhere in her sto­ry does it say
she is called this way because
this is her heal­ing name …

No I don’t know how I wound up in the woods
that year hold­ing
still under a hot sun facing

X ask­ing me if I remem­ber what he did
but I remem­ber
I remem­ber what he did …

(“Call Me by My Heal­ing Name”)

The rest of the col­lec­tion explores pre­cise­ly what heal­ing might mean and how it might occur. These poems hint at sources and places rang­ing from the genizah (stor­age area for dam­aged rit­u­al objects and texts), to a now-shut­tered night­club, to a grandmother’s kitchen:

In her kitchen wall­pa­pered in volets
my grand­moth­er warns me to love
every­one, to nev­er hate

anyone’s skin, tra­di­tion, or coun­try—
not after the dec­i­ma­tion that found her family.

(“The Whole Story”)

Herrick’s appeal to these sources grad­u­al­ly empow­ers her to imag­ine her­self as a new person.

The final poems in the col­lec­tion affirm and cel­e­brate our pow­er to reimag­ine our­selves and the world. One rethinks Gen­e­sis and the role of human­i­ty; anoth­er makes poet­ic use of the seg­u­lah (tal­is­man); and a third offers instruc­tions for writ­ing our way to heal­ing. The poet wan­ders the wilder­ness of her past with us, ask­ing us to call up our own waste­land mem­o­ries. Her book offers us hope in its por­tray­al of Judaism as renew­ing, renew­able, and rel­e­vant to our cur­rent time.

could bless­ing be currency

in the com­ing world and if that world is always arriv­ing,
could we start right now?

(“Tak­ing in Vain Can Also Be Trans­lat­ed as Bear­ing Emptiness”)