Psalms

by Joy Ladin

These psalms grow out of a decades-long fascination with the biblical psalms, particularly the Davidic psalms, which portray the tempestuous, sometimes awful intimacy of the Divine-human relationship. In the lightning-shot Psalm-space where Divine meets human, time shatters, splits, leaps like a river, and so does the soul of the speaker, now hunting God, now hunted, now languishing in despair, now reclining in quiet triumph against the pillars of Heavens.

These contemporary psalms attempt to create a corollary to that biblical psalm space, a space narrowed to a single room in which God and the speaker have no choice but to face and struggle toward one another through the whirlwind of pain and love.

"God has a lot to answer for, and Joy Ladin doesn't let him off easy in Psalms. Intimate, exacting, agonistic, and seductive, these poems could only come from a believer who demands not easy professions, but ecstatic confirmations of faith. Ultimately Ladin sings to God songs we would all profit by hearing, songs that bear the scars as well as caresses of her encounter with the divine."
-David Bergman
author of Heroic Measures

"As with the canonical psalms, Ladin's Psalms capture an experience that is at once deeply personal and universal-intimacy with a Divine Presence that can fill us with both ecstasy and revulsion, often simultaneously. God is not merely in our pleasure and pain; God is our pleasure and pain."
-Rev. Allyson Robinson
Associate Director of Diversity, Human Rights Campaign

Genres: Poetry, Judaism, Transgender

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2010

Reviews

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, cohesive, thought-provoking collection of meditations on the body, humanity, and the gd/Divine that tethers us to a universe we cannot understand. Ladin does an incredible job grounding her work in the material realities of trans subjectivity as well as in everyday imagery: sex, thighs, the bed, the child, and more. At the same time, these 61 pages are a meditation on the ineffable our bodies can only, frustratedly gesture at, presenting an emotional challenge for all of us –– especially those who wrestle with our bodies as (much as we wrestle with) gd.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this multiple times...simply excellent and I look forward to reading more of Joy's work!!

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read these as meditations on body and God before doing my own morning meditation, so I don't feel equipped to speak on them re. form, only my personal felt experience of them. They are frequently haunting and melancholy, her reflections on her relationship to the holy is markedly different than my own in tenor but similar in intensity (I base this also on reading her book "The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective"), so I'm looking forward to returning to these and pondering some more.

[Abi (The Knights Who Say Book)]

DNF'd a bit over halfway through. I loved both of Joy Ladin's books that I've read, but I just wasn't feeling this poetry. There's nothing bad about it, I was just never inspired to pick up the book and keep reading.

[Adrian Shanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

powerful collection of modern liturgical poetry that comes from a lens of writing queer and trans bodies into the sacred Jewish texts.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these, I felt it was a bit of Shakespeare sonnets along with Biblical references. The lines flowed and I was enthralled.