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Wrestling with Tradition: A Review of Jessica Jacobs’s unalone



Jessica Jacobs


unalone


Four Way Books / 2024 / 210 pp / $17.95 Paperback


Reviewed by James Long / November 2024

 


 

In the preface to her collection, The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011, Alicia Suskin Ostriker writes, “Like many Jews, in and out of the synagogue, I wrestle with sacred tradition like Jacob wrestling the angel.” I was fortunate to discover Ostriker’s book earlier this year, and the statement from her preface provides the perfect introduction to discuss Jessica Jacobs’s new book, unalone, which brims with a similar tension. The collection, organized in twelve sections titled by Hebrew words for the first twelve chapters of Genesis, presents poems which reimagine and converse with those foundational Bible stories while often challenging their conventional messages. Jacobs, herself Jewish, pushes back with what now seem obvious questions about the aborted sacrifice of Isaac, the singular zeal of Noah. She also weaves in themes of environmental and sexual politics which seem suddenly not so new when discussed in the context of this ancient text. unalone is a striving work of tender poems where homage to tradition seems a ballast against the ever-questioning force of a seeking mind.

 

unalone's content springs directly from Judaism. Words written in Hebrew characters appear throughout, followed by their English translations, as in the poem “And God Speaks,” which references Creation’s origin as, “מָאוֹר Ma’ ohr! (source of light).” In fact, Hebrew words, biblical structure, and Bible character stories (many of which I learned in the Christian phase of my upbringing) figure so centrally in unalone they seem an expression of pride. However, while Jacobs roots these poems in Judeo-Christian religious narrative, she persistently challenges that narrative as in the opening poem, “Stepping Through the Gate.” In its first line she observes, “Make a fence, said the rabbis, around the Torah.” Jacobs’s speaker, describing a walk with her dog, counters, “like drops of ink dripping from the branches, / the blackberries call us to make a quill of our tongues. // Let every fence in my mind have a gate.” Thus, in the field of metaphor, she issues her opening challenge to convention.

 

The poem “Why There is No Hebrew Word for Obey” imagines the familial strife resulting from God’s command that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. In Sunday school, I was conditioned to feel relief in the story’s “happy” ending, yet Jacobs, taking full advantage of her omniscient perspective, pushes further:

 

What came later, even with Isaac alive

in the fields, inside

 

Abraham was the knowledge

of what he’d been willing to do. 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

 

I suspect Jacobs was also taught, as I was, to admire Abraham’s faithful willingness to carry out this awful deed. She exposes the danger of such militant devotion later in the poem when she compares it to the killer’s state of mind as he shot Jews in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, “when a man burning / with unquestioning belief / entered with a gun.” Jacobs asks,

 

What if we turn

from certainty and arm ourselves

instead with questions?

Obey, obey, obey is everywhere

 

She sees deeply inside these stories and brings them alive in our time. unalone’s tour de force poem, “Collective Nouns,” in the section titled “ נח Noach (Noah/Rest),” challenges conventional interpretations of the Flood as Jacobs reimagines sacred-stoic Noah to be a stubborn emblem of the patriarchy. The epigraph, citing a news headline, prepares us for this divergent view and anticipates another of the poem’s suggestions, that destroying the world by flood is a ruling-class act of power on par with global warming: “In ‘climate apartheid,’ rich will save themselves while poor suffer.” She casts Noah as a zealot who advances patriarchal God’s destructive agenda through force of language:

 

When Noah was still

            just a man, not yet sailor and savior,

God said,

                                    Make yourself a word,

                                    for I have decided to silence

                                    all flesh.

 

With these lines, the ark becomes metaphor for the tyranny of words (unalone is a meditation on the power of language as well —in this case Jacobs notes in the epigraph the Hebrew origin of ark can also translate literally as “word”). Perhaps the most obvious tyranny she calls out is God’s exclusive assignment as male, as he. Noah becomes “a silent man in a silenced world, / drifting in a wooden word.” Noah and the power structure he represents are rigid, limited, brutal, barren. Jacobs calls him God’s “little wind-up toy” and, in his wife’s view, “never lying beside her, never tasting.” At poem’s end, pleading, the speaker asks, “can’t we build a peaceful fleet,” with “words that welcome / not just some, but // all?”

 

Jacobs interweaves images and narratives from modern, everyday life to bring Genesis stories into present-day relevance. Sometimes she explores family memories to find her unique place in tradition, as in the poem “Sleepwalkers in the Garden,” which evokes Eden alongside musings about her grandmother:

 

   When my grandmother

moaned into the pain of her final days, there

were her bottom teeth—those pickets, the same

irregular thicket as mine. Her eyes, the same

too, only flecked with the green of new leaves.

 

Why had it taken until then to see? Paradise

is every moment we’ve ever left, all the small

unnoticed gardens we can never again enter.

 

Jacobs brings the biblical one step closer to the human in poems like the long-titled “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her.” Here, she describes tending Rachel’s sheep in sensuous detail: “And he watered her flock and kissed her mouth.” “Her mouth,” Jacobs writes, was “bright as the nectar of pomegranates.” The sonnet’s conclusion brings the story and the speaker’s current life together in a direct address to the speaker’s own lover. She observes generally how our desires exist within us before we can identify them, then expands with the example, “The lack of you // alive in me long before / I knew your face.”

 

unalone is highly ambitious with 165 pages of poems, a volume that asserts itself alongside the most read book in history. It seems part of the aim is to draw readers into a limited, yet authentic engagement with the Hebrew language. While I appreciated the chance to read Hebrew words scattered throughout the poems, I must admit I found them slightly distracting at times, especially in initial readings. Absorbing the unfamiliar characters (which are followed by their English translations) may ultimately deepen the experience for some, but readers unaccustomed to Hebrew should expect to pause and parse through those instances. There are also a few moments when it seems the poet’s passion for meaning overrides a poem’s organic energy. For instance, in “Comfort Food,” she tells the story of Jacob cooking lentils to comfort his father, Isaac, when Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, dies. She juxtaposes this with her speaker also cooking lentils, after the death of her grandparents: “blood becoming earth, red lentils mulching / to brown in the pot.” Her push—just after these lines to a final stanza where she writes, “To my dead, / I sing, I have waited so long for you”—seems to override the powerfully charged and suggestive lentils image in favor of a planned expression.

 

If unalone ever veers toward excess, it shines in its moments of human empathy and artistry. Some of its strongest moments lie in the series of lyric poems titled “And God Speaks.” In one, she revisits the opening poem’s gate metaphor and suggests unalone’s ultimate stance toward belief. Despite how she wrestles, Jacobs imagines hearing God’s voice as, “Not terror but // awe—fear with a hinge / toward entrance.”


 

James Long’s poems have appeared in Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, and Kestrel, and are forthcoming in Pirene’s Fountain. A recent MFA graduate of Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann School of Writing, Long lives, works, and writes in Charleston, West Virginia.

 

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