*Library Journal | Best Poetry of 2024
*Jewish Book Council’s Editor’s Pick
*Jewish Women’s Archive Summer Book Club Pick
*Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) Noteworthy Title
ISBN: 978-1954245822 / $17.95
Four Way Books / March 15, 2024
Order here: Four Way Books | Bookshop.org | Amazon
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Deeply personal and yet universal in its truths, unalone draws on the Book of Genesis as a living document whose stories, wisdom, and ethical knots can engage us more fully with our own lives—whatever your religious tradition or spiritual beliefs.
Praise for unalone
“Speaking to Jew and Gentile, believer and nonbeliever, this poetry collection makes our hungers radiant. Highly recommended.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal, *Starred Review*
“[A] profound, often harrowing, sometimes wry reflection on the book of Genesis. Jacobs weaves back and forth from her own life to foundational Biblical verses and characters.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club
“Jacobs mobilizes a tangle of daily life, Jewish life, and Torah in her work. She displays an impressive amount of knowledge but always lets her stories shine, keeping them engaging and accessible. unalone is a bold and original collection from a poet in her full power.”—Julie R. Enszer, Jewish Book Council
“unalone’s sublime resplendence is steeped in sorrow, longing, anger, and grief. The art of recognizing “The still // small voice you’ve known / all your life” animates the book’s 12 sections, which render the parshiyot (portions) of Genesis through ancestral and contemporary lenses, including moving poems about impending maternal loss.”—Virginia Konchan, Poetry Foundation
“‘”The book is a kind of Torah ecosystem, with each story and theme braiding or unspooling into, and echoing off of, all the others. In some ways, the most meaningful response I can muster would be to hand you the book and advise you to read it. Like the tradition it plumbs, it is nearly bottomless and will sustain and reward nearly infinite re-readings. . . .Which brings me back to ‘read the book.’ It is dazzling, gorgeous, thoughtful, spiritual, relevant, and even fun. But an even better idea might be to read it with a friend, or a few friends, and as you read, to talk about what you find there. Together.”—Catherine Carter, North Carolina Literary Review
“The energy of Jacobs’s language and lines drives each poem, moving readers forward from one turn of phrase to another, until each conceit clicks in place splendidly. For instance, “Free Will” provides both delight and surprise as we learn, “break is both // opportunity and fracture, as cleave / holds fast while it also splits apart, // our hands—those striving hymns / of contranyms.” To echo Emily Dickinson, such exquisite, insightful language blew the top of my head off.”—Julie L. Moore, The Christian Century
“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.”—Anastasios Mihalopoulos, Tupelo Quarterly
“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. . . . 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.”—Adrienne Scanlon Ross, New York Journal of Books
“Jacobs examines the darkness both outside herself and beneath her own skin, all through the lens of Torah, the study of which she likens to prayer. A wise and worthy guide, Jacobs’s poems are generous invitations to journey past chain links and picket fences, beyond all barriers and into ancient terrain. The collection is a testament to how unalone we really are, always traveling in the company of teachers and peers who came before and stand beside us.”—Diane Gottlieb, The Rumpus
“Interpretive and original, respectful and playful, scholarly and personal, this volume is both poetry and midrash at once. . . . And just as Torah readers will be coming back to the same portions next year, they will be also be returning to classic Midrash, and maybe Sefer Yashar, and Avivah Zornberg and Robert Alter. I hope, they will also come back to Jessica Jacobs and her poems.”—Jake Marmer, Tablet Magazine
“Jessica Jacobs re-envisions every line in Genesis. Of Jacob wrestling with an angel, Jacobs writes: “In your arms, all the promises you’ve yet to keep, all you’ve done that shames you. But what is wrestling if not an embrace?” Struggle re-seen, transformed into comfort. This is poetry not just grounded in the text, but deeply committed to exploring its big themes—our relationship to God, how the world should be, and how we should live in the world.”—Deborah Bacharach, The Los Angeles Review
“Be it through unalone or previous collections, there is a ferocity and tenderness to her poems that make room for curious minds to settle into the known and unknown. In teaching, she makes room for her students by showing how to find the good in an albeit prickly world. In leading, she makes room by nourishing Jewish storytelling at Yetzirah, a literary nonprofit she founded that supports Jewish poets.”—Orly Zebak, Niv Magazine
“This brief review does not permit me to recount the rich sensory detail gracing Jacobs’s well-wrought lines, the fruit of intense study but always grounded in embodied experience. Jacobs knows that “The way to God / is not around the world but through it.” Written with skill and wisdom rare in so young a poet, unalone is nothing short of stunning and—like Wiman’s new book—blows dust from traditions many have abandoned. Read them both.”—Brian Volck, Slant Books
“Her thoughts on Scripture, Jewish life and tradition, her experience as a queer woman, and the beauty and brokenness of this world effortlessly flow together, bleeding and blending like watercolors….Jacobs charts a chronological path through Genesis, dialoguing with other writers and the text itself. She does not treat the characters in Genesis as towering figures but as human beings. From there she draws a lineage of humanity.”—Delaney Coyne, America: The Jesuit Review
“Jessica Jacobs’s unalone is a stunning and exciting example of what can happen when biblical scholarship and discipline fuse with the richness of a seasoned poetic mind. Jacobs’s poems explore how the biblical stories found in the book of Genesis speak importantly and powerfully to the currency of today’s world. They reveal how biblical metaphor can shed insight as we grapple with ways to understand the fragile humanness of our lives today.”—Michael S. Glaser, Friends Journal
“This poetry collection insists there is something powerful and elevated in the spiritual realm, and through study and reflection, we might attain a fraction of it. This fraction will guide and heal us. It will bring us closer to the meaning we seek in such a chaotic world. Love will save us: the love we have for each other, for ourselves, our traditions, our history, and the sacred.”—Sisel Gelman, Sinister Wisdom
“unalone is, arguably, her most universal work. It is a book that goes back to the Garden to understand how we have fallen so far and fast towards environmental catastrophe, though the Earth itself scolds us like a mother to a child: “I am trying / to warn you….I send wrong weather, drain / reefs of their color, let whole species / go extinct. Yet you go on. / Enough. Too much,” she writes in “And the Ground Opens Its Mouth to Speak.”—Tony Barnstone, Red Canary Magazine
“Jacobs, a master of Midrash, delves into the book of Genesis, using it as a portal into her own psyche and the psyche of the world, or perhaps what Paul Tillich called the ground of being.”—Nin Andrews, Best American Poetry Blog
“It’s a beautiful collection that takes the reader through a sustained lectio divina, bringing them into the text through unique touchpoints of empathy and memory. While reading, I found myself experiencing the range of primordial, cosmic, etiological, and mundane motifs of Genesis in a refreshed way, with a conversation partner whose social location and imaginative sensitivity helped bring me closer to the text than I had felt in a while.”—Terry Stokes, Episcopal lay minister, Earth & Altar
“To read the poems in Jessica Jacobs’ unalone is to come alongside another human who is listening deeply, listening to her own experience as a queer Jewish woman in contemporary America and listening to the ancient stories of the Torah….Jacobs draws up personal and timeless communal experience, but also the anxieties and difficulties of our particular 2024 moment: a culture deeply divided, a climate in crisis.”—Jessie van Eerden, TRAMPOLINE
“Like our matriarch Serah, the Torah’s first poet, Jessica Jacobs opens the Book of Genesis to her readers like a gate ‘with an easy latch and well-oiled hinges.’ She takes the time to notice, allowing readers to hear ‘a sound they know so well’ as though they’ve never heard it. Jacobs is this generation’s immaculate poet of the tents, taking us back to ourselves, fully. She amplifies ‘the still small voice you’ve known all your life,’ so through her deep wisdom you remember you are unalone.”—Rabbi Burton Visotzky, author of Reading the Book: Making the Bible a Timeless Text
“Jessica Jacobs’s unalone seeks and reframes the light of Genesis, poem by poem. Out of strangeness and curiosity, her poems continue pushing into the unknown of Genesis. Her poems are the inner life of what Genesis means, in all its vials, structures, voices, and signs. Sensitively aware of Genesis as a living document, the poems use the etymology of its words to show moments where its meanings in our lives are perceptible and barely perceptible. The poems are spoken in a textured, female voice and also show how women in Genesis are not tourists, but integral to its untranslatable song. It’s a fascinating, crafted, and authoritative book.”
—Sean Singer, Today in the Taxi, National Jewish Book Award Winner
“Jessica Jacobs plays the Bible like a klezmer. She’s serious. She’s whimsical. She’s sorrowful. She’s kind. She’s measured. She midrashes Genesis to bend the Bible until the verses speak to a queer Jewish poet. Her ambition? ‘To zip myself into Judaism.’ Making space where there had been none. ‘No husband, no children, her songs/were her progeny,’ she writes. Lucid, deft, circumspect, generous, sagacious, she gets down on her poetic knees and plants a green new tree of knowledge. Jacobs seeds, stakes, pollinates, flourishes, blooms.”
—Reverend Spencer Reece, author of The Clerk’s Tale & The Road to Emmaus
“Lost Edens and losing a parent, love and marriage, climate change, what it means for a human being to be ‘a conduit for the divine’– these are only a few of the subjects unalone addresses seriously and sensuously, reaching deep into Jewish tradition and personal experience, and, stretching expansively, exuberantly, beyond them. Along the way, unalone offers a master class in modern midrash, a series of dazzling demonstrations of how ruminating on and reimagining ancient Biblical stories can offer new ways of wrestling with the most contemporary of problems: dementia, mass shootings, pandemic, marginalization, the long shadows cast by slavery and genocide, the stochastic and institutionalized terrorisms fostered by what their perpetrators call faith. No matter her subject, throughout Jacobs’ flowing, varied verse, soul-opening epigrams suddenly appear – ‘a zodiac of branch-bound constellations,’ ‘sprinklers stuttered covenants of rainbows,’ ‘you must leave the place that grew you to grow toward better stars’ – as unalone summons us to realize that ‘Perfectly imperfect, each of us / is a new way of saying.’”
—Joy Ladin, author of The Book of Anna, National Jewish Book Award Winner
“This collection opens with the poem ‘Stepping through the Gate,’ which begins with the line, ‘Make a fence, said the rabbis, around the Torah,’ which traditionally is understood as a means of protection, of guarding the holy Torah and keeping it at the center of Jewish peoples’ lives and preserving the core values of Judaism. Near the end of the poem, Jacobs writes, ‘Let every fence in my mind have a gate. / With an easy latch and well-oiled hinges.’ Like much of unalone, Jacobs takes a traditional understanding of a topic or story and finds a way to open a new ‘gate’ to provide a personal and contemporary perspective….This creative, original interpretation of Genesis ultimately helps the reader examine these classic stories anew and reflect on how they can inform our contemporary lives.”—Jamie Wendt, Still: The Journal