About this item
Highlights
- your palms are sand and wail of oceans misplaced between threadsPoetry is a commentary on life, on the human longing to find shelter in a space where the spiritual and the physical, the holy and the profane meet.
- Author(s): Tikva Hecht
- 118 Pages
- Poetry, Jewish
- Series Name: Jewish Poetry Project
Description
Book Synopsis
your palms are sand and wail of oceans misplaced between threadsPoetry is a commentary on life, on the human longing to find shelter in a space where the spiritual and the physical, the holy and the profane meet. For thousands of years, the exploration of text, of words, of what was not said between the lines has been a creative and meaning-making outlet for Jewish scholars and artists. Tikva Hecht inscribes herself into this tradition, adding her distinct and honest voice, inquisitive, meditative, enchanting.
Review Quotes
These fiercely intelligent and achingly lonely poems braid together longing for human connection, longing for God, skepticism, and existential isolation. Like Emily Dickinson's, the business of Hecht's lyrics is circumference: in language as intimate as it is abstract, as tender as it is savage, these poems summon us to see the human condition - the poet's and our own - from deep within and high above at the same time, "to bind our longing / into sheaves and call it prayer."
-Joy Ladin, author of National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna and Shekhinah Speaks.
In her astonishing debut, Tashlikh, Tikva Hecht writes, "I tell you// my tongue hurts from all this/ in a different language// than my longing first spoke." And yes, how precisely these poems forge a language from the edge of the self, through a wilderness of faith and desire. I found myself holding my breath as I read Hecht's poems, startled by the depth of her reach and revelation, "as if words could imitate the rush of waves." Reader, this is one of the most realized and sublime debuts I have encountered-like all true art, it offers the complex and necessary gift of a world made stranger, and more alive.
-Allison Benis White, author of Please Bury Me in This
Tashlikh is an impossibly stunning debut, and Tikva Hecht will be read and revered not just for her luminous, patient artistry, but because these poems, in the end, stare down the human who dared walk through such doors. If Hecht is a religious poet, it's primarily because she deepens the religion itself, her vital body and mind startling ancient rituals with honest ache and unabbreviated longing.
-Katie Ford, author of If You Have to Go