unalone

“Jacobs is in conversation with stories that are at once tribal and universal.”

“Let every fence in my mind have a gate. / With an easy latch and well-oiled hinges,” writes award-winning poet Jessica Jacobs in Unalone: Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis. “Let us honor what we love / by taking it in.” What better invitation to enter a garden of biblical stories as ancient as DNA, as contemporary as a heartbeat?

Jacobs begins her conversation with Bereshit (Genesis) at the very beginning, when God “commences the ceremony / of separations”, thereby defining the world as we know it. Writes Jacobs, “light needs creating—darkness is already here . . . /when there is nothing but light, nothing / can be seen.”

Jacobs marries that first creation to the separations that follow, whether the death of a beloved grandparent, the slow loss of parents flowing away with dementia, the lasting terrors of slavery and violence, the rivalries of siblings, and so many other problems of contemporary life. She refuses the modern trap of ignoring or reinterpreting away anything that is problematic to contemporary eyes. She understands that the biblical stories’ eerie, enduring relevance stems from their capacity to prod, question, inspire, annoy, challenge, and nurture—often all at the same time.

Rather than stay within the narrow landscape of lived experience, Jacobs roots her poems in the hard-won study of Hebrew and biblical commentaries and conundrums without end. Unalone is grounded in the centuries old Jewish tradition of pardes, which is both Hebrew for garden and an acronym for a method of biblical interpretation that searches out the plain meanings (peshat), the hints of allegory (remez), the legal or moral interpretations (derash), and the secret, mystical meanings (sod) that reveal, perhaps, what God is, and what is wanted of us.

With so many layers of meaning, even the simplest text can hold within it unending wonders. So, too, with Jacobs’ poems.

Sarah can regard her husband Abraham, forefather of world’s leading monotheistic religions, with clarity rather than cynicism (“Greatness, treasured in legends / is seldom a comfort at the breakfast table.”), while Methuselah looks back on his too-long life with knowledge edged with nostalgia (“In the beginning, each day was bright / as a new coin fit for spending. Now? / Nothing is allowed to be exquisitely itself.”)

In “After the Flood,” Jacobs is careful to note that the Hebrew word for “ark” can also be translated to mean “word.” And so, Jacobs has God saying to Noah, “Make of yourself a word / for I have decided to silence / all flesh,” a command that, for Jacobs, evolves into an entreaty for humanity to address the economic inequities behind climate change’s impact: “. . . can’t we build a peaceful fleet / lashed by syntax and spring lines / into a sentence of survival: / words that welcome / not just some, but / all?”

In that spirit, Unalone isn’t a book only for Jews, no matter how wayward (“If something is worked for / can it still be true?”). Jacobs is in conversation with stories that are at once tribal and universal. She underscores this with annotated notes for nearly every poem and a sturdy if select bibliography. A reader of any spiritual belief (or none) can open Unalone’s gate and wander spellbound in a garden where the sacred blossoms in daily life with all its unavoidable beauty, its unchosen illumination, its elusive immanence.

There are no easy answers or simple comforts in Unalone’s garden. There is, however, a painful irony that Jacobs, founder of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, brings her book forth at a time when Jewish and Israeli writers are increasingly shut out of literary magazines and presses, their work rejected or silenced as a protest of the Hamas-initiated war in Gaza. Unalone offers a different conversation for writers and readers: “What if we turn / from certainty and arm ourselves / instead with questions?”