How to Make a Jewish Poem
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Rachel Mennies. From The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards. Texas Tech University Press, 2014.
In an interview with Michigan Quarterly Review, Rachel Mennies described living in the world as a Jewish person and writing poems in that stance “as being shaped and defined by feeling perpetually a step outside of or away from the living world. Perhaps that’s a feeling that comes from a history steeped in diaspora and resettling, but I think it’s also one that’s steeped in curiosity and a need, always, for questioning a thing even as we love it. That, to me, feels especially Jewish: to hold something we love in our hands but still ask ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ and ‘who am I, to hold this?’ and ‘how long will it stay?’ I think my poems are all Jewish because they’re all curious, and they’re all petitioning, in one way or another.”