unalone

by Jessica Jacobs

“Make a fence, said the rabbis, around the Torah,” reads the first line of Jessica Jacobs' unalone. By the end of this opening poem, however, Jacobs has defined her engagement with religious texts as an act of devotion to living fully in the world’s “Here, love, is fruit with the sun still inside it. Let me // thumb the juice from your chin. Let us honor what we love / by taking it in.” Structured around the twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis, the trajectory of unalone parallels immersion in Jewish teachings with the contemporary world. Whether conversing with the sacred texts she reads or writing from her subjects' perspectives, Jacobs navigates an abundance of growing up queer, embracing one's sexuality, reversing roles as the adult child of aging parents, wrestling with religious history and the imposed roles of womanhood, exploring how the past foreshadows our current climate crisis, and revisiting the blush of new love while cataloging the profound, though more familiar, joys of a long relationship. 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. In this stunning and ambitious book, Jacobs reminds us that all poetry serves as a kind of prayer – a recognition of beauty, a spoken bid for connection, a yearning toward an understanding that might better guide us through our days. When you “dive / from the twin heights of your eyes,” “that tiny pool below” isn’t God. “Well, not exactly,” Jacobs comforts us. “It’s you. One breath deeper than you’ve / ever been, one breath closer to the heeded, heedful world.” 

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 2024

About the author

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Goldie Award in Poetry from the Golden Crown Literary Society, and a finalist for both the Brockman-Campbell and Julie Suk Book Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Julie Suk Award. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and is now the Chapbook Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is at work on parallel collections of essays and poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.

Reviews

[Tree · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of poems that I highly recommend.

[K.T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every poem unflinching and exquisitely wrought. A collection to savor. ❤️

[rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

good reminder that the midrash tradition runs laps around a cursory sunday school knowledge of the OT wow

(3.5)

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a challenge to writing a book based entirely on faith. To be earnest. To recognize the complexity implicit to faith. To be present with the Biblical text but not beholden. The strength of Jacobs’s book is its honest accounting of Genesis. Even going so far as to consider religion an artificial layer to what religion accounts as its own fundamental truths. Because even for the religious person, religion is an artificiality, to the extent that it sees the capacity for universal truth, or eternity, or origin of the entire universe, but the actual language used to explain this is only ever an estimation of what God knows. For instance, as a Christian, I would say Jesus fulfilling the role as “Son of God” who is also “God,” and, like a dimension that comes from now where, Jesus is also “the Word,” is hard to put my mind around. Plainly speaking, it feels like a jostle of outrageous contradictions. And yet, with faith, I believe there is some sense to these contradictions. And if I occupy the truth underlying these contradictions, I might understand the insight God intends, or at least I’ll understand how the people who have themselves benefited from long religious reflections have understood what they think God might intend.

I’m just trying to lay the foundation for what I think Jacobs would like to establish. Religion is more estimation than absolute certainty. Religion is an ethos, and for a book like Genesis, an ethos is helpful for navigating the vast scope of its stories. Or it could be. For my reading, the book’s challenge is synthesizing reverent intent with lived experiences. The book’s ambition is to match the complexity and scope of the stories in Genesis, to show the people of that book are more than just the characters that might have been shorthanded into as their have been told so many different times. And for religion to matter for someone it need not exist as a 1:1 match. Even if the match is more about adjacency than equivalence. I think, though, once the book encounters the Abrahamic tradition it gets mired in which part of Genesis specifically inspired a specific poem. It needs to ensure the match is recognized by a reader. And, in the process, the broader view can’t hold itself above all that.

Maybe it’s that some stories in and of themselves constitute an entire tradition (spanning the creation of the world, to Noah, to Abraham, to Jacob). Add to that the poet’s own agenda to shed a feminist light on these stories (Sarai/Sarah, in particular). Genesis might be characterized as a series of disjunctive “tales” that must have some sense to them as they’ve survived among people this long. Jacobs reads it as a Jewish woman who is interested in her faith and afraid of whether her individual faith proves authority enough and assured that her imaginative engagement with these tales will yield something. This for me is the core strength of the book. But it feels weighed down by negotiating with not just a Biblical text, but all the texts that are part of that.

[lily]

a mixed bag for me, though that is perhaps due in part to my own unfounded expectations! I was particularly fond of jacobs’ pieces which crossed over into more exegetical territory. favorites include “covenant between the pieces,” “and abraham came to eulogize sarah,” “the question I’ve wanted to hide,” “so jacob served seven years for rachel,” “the hendiadys of marriage,” “another kind,” and “jacob’s gift.”

unrated because I know I don’t really “get” contemporary poetry the way others do

[Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The range of this book! The crocodiles! The relationship with the sacred. It made me feel held while allowing me to question.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous poetry and amazing poet. Her poems glisten with awareness and subtely.

[Anna Ferrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book of poetry that places the ancient histories into the present day. It was very eye-opening and moving I'm so glad I decided to read this book.