Jessica Jacobs’s third full-length poetry collection is a masterwork in conversation with the Book of Genesis. Part inhabitation, part expansion, these poems function to retell, reimagine, and reacclimatize the stories of Genesis. From Abraham and Joseph to Eve and Sarah, Jacobs reminds us that this book is a living document and regardless of one’s religious or spiritual beliefs, these stories are for everyone.
The collection opens with a poem titled “Stepping Through the Gate” where Jacobs actively resists a rabbi’s statement that says, “Make a fence around the Torah” and writes,
Called up to the Torah, a reader tracks the cramped letters
with a yad—a metal pointer topped by a tiny pointing hand.
If it feels colder than the air, it’s because silver steals
your body’s heat, this tool to keep your place, keep you
in your place, to keep you from marring even a single sacred letter. (1)
There is a deft attenuation to both content and meter at work here and throughout the collection. In this poem, we feel the strictness of the teachings, the passing through the gate, the fence, as no easy task. It begs us to question the walls we build and why we build them. This opening poem addresses the fear of marring a single sacred letter, the idea that such texts are so untouchable that we must use a metal pointer to read them rather than our own hand. Jacobs goes on “But sometimes barriers grow so large it’s hard to see/what they’re protecting”(1). As we enter the collection, readers understand that such texts should not be guarded, but opened “with an easy latch and well-oiled hinges”(1).
From climate change, queer identity, and colonization to marriage, love, and loss, the poems in this collection always begin at the biblical before spindling outwards into the subtle crevices of day-to-day life. Jacobs elegantly threads etymology and story, generating powerful frameshifts. In “Why There Is No Hebrew Word for Obey” she writes,
What if we turn
from certainty and arm ourselves
instead with questions?
Obey, obey, obey is everywhere
in translation. The real word is
shema: listen (60)
These evocative annunciations echo and accumulate throughout the collection. Readers cannot help but learn to listen and watch as Jacobs bends, breaks, and reforms some of the oldest stories and texts of our time. Organized into twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis, the collection serves as a kind of mirror to the original text. It moves through the stories of the Torah and entangles them with Jacobs’ own. Amidst a series of persona poems that wed and reimagine figures of the bible there is a sequence of poems titled “And God Speaks,” in which Jacobs takes on the voice of God and the physical shape of the tzimtzum – “the contraction of God’s infinite self in order to create space, a void, at God’s center in which our world and the free will of those within that world could exist” (168). In the form of the tzimtzum, Jacobs deftly situates poems throughout the collection in such a way that the reader visually experiences the author making space for herself in the pages of the bible even in between the breaths of God himself.
There is a kind of combinatory power to the persona poems of this collection as Jacobs writes, “I’m trying to grow a lawn/on me, to zip myself into Judaism/like a patchwork parka of grass, hoping it might take/ hold, might one day fit snug as a golf course greenway. (12). Such resonance of larger biblical motifs can also be traced through the more personal narratives that exist in this collection specifically in “Learning to run Barefoot in a Dry Riverbed at Dawn”. This poem shimmers between a capture of physical ecstasy and an extended metaphor for learning to read and reread the book of Genesis. The poem begins with an epigraph,
shacharit, whose root is shachar (dawn), is the traditional
Jewish morning prayer service said to have originated with Abraham:
“And Abraham rose early in the morning to the place where he had
stood before God.”
—Genesis 19:27
This epigraph, like many throughout the collection serve to situate readers and to contiguously place the text and poem in conversation. Even further this poem can be read as a tracking of Jacobs’ journey towards finding a place for herself within the context of Judaism with instructive lines like “Revise your strides” and “Inscribe/ your prints beside the birds’ and the elks’ “(55). Here, through a blended rhetoric of revision and footwork, we see the poet eliding between running in a dry riverbed and reading the book of Genesis. Articulate and vibrant poems such as this, that yolk story, image, and theology illuminate the careful work involved in how one comes to feel unalone.
Jacobs bends the stories of the bible and inserts her own in a way that remains fastened to the meaning of the Torah while also expanding the text further than it has gone in the hands of others before. She is carefully attuned to the importance and power of story-telling as she writes,
Like our souls wear speech and action to be known
in this fallen world, the Torah wears stories
that look like us: Joseph in his many-colored coat
was known for how he was dressed (137)
Here, the author carefully articulates the lengths we go to place ourselves, the stories we need, and how we must continue to keep telling and retelling them. This sentiment is best observed in the final poem of the collection, “Aliyah” and the final line from which the book draws its title. In the notes section Jacobs mentions that this poem reckons with proverb 3:18, she writes “Of the Torah it is written, ‘she is a tree of life to those who grasp her, and whoever holds her is happy’ ”(186) In the final poem Jacobs metaphorizes the Torah into a single tree with the opening line “Let me speak to you as the tree I climbed as a child” (165) and like a tree that bends and moves in the wind so too does the Torah in Jacobs’ hands. In the final stanza she writes,
A vantage we could not have reached
on our own, a vision otherwise beyond us.
All of us, in that overstory, unalone. (165)
Jacobs’ collection arrives at a powerful and resonant ending with this final stanza. It utilizes the energy of the extended metaphor alongside a sonic stitching of the internal rhyme between “on our own” and “unalone” to configure a sense of understanding in the reader, that these poems, this overstory represent a tree that we can all benefit from learning to climb.
Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian-American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his M.F.A. in poetry from the Northeast Ohio MFA program and his B.S. in both chemistry and English from Allegheny College. His work has appeared in Scientific American, Pithead Chapel, Blue Earth Review, West Trade Review, Ergon, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick.