unalone: Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis

By Jessica Jacobs. Four Way Books, 2024. 210 pages. $17.95/paperback; $9.99/eBook.

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.

Many of these poems quite literally took my breath away with their startling insights and explications of biblical texts in ways that not only make perfect experiential sense but also break through the crusty standard interpretations that have left us unsatisfied in the past. For example, in an impeccably well-woven poem, “In the Shadow of Babel,” the author speaks in the first person present tense as she runs “along the Hudson” and begins wondering about the way language changes identity: fleeing pogroms, her great-grandfather had his name changed from “Kudlanski” to “Goodman” when he arrived at Ellis Island. And then her stream-of-conscious mind ponders how it is that enslaved peoples are “forced to speak / the colonists’ language.” All of this leads her to realize that “[b]ecause a president praised / rabid men who chanted . . . Jews will not replace us,” she now lives in a country that feels not meant for her. It is a country filled with “many souls / and their deficiencies” in which suddenly “we’d have no reason / to speak . . . to reach out. . . . To seek faces and lives / different than our own.” It is a country that, metaphorically, has become another Babel.

A fascination I have long had with biblical stories is paying attention to what is not said: what is left out. Jacobs’s poems address with insight many of my own curiosities about gaps in biblical story lines. For example, in her poem “From the Cave, Her Voice,” Jacobs imagines Sarah’s voice speaking about Abraham after he had buried her:

A great man but rarely a good one. A father
to our people, not much of one
to our sons. Greatness, treasured in legends,
is seldom a comfort at the breakfast table.

And then, she speaks of Abraham, as he “came to eulogize Sarah” (as recorded in Genesis 23:2): “Even / as we mourn, love gives us back to ourselves.”

In a book as wide-ranging as the book of Genesis, Jacobs’s reflections and explications focus mostly on the creation stories (Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and Jacob) but are as wide-ranging as Genesis itself, often veering off to wonder about the gaps in a story’s narrative. Often events from Jacobs’s own life are used to reflect back and shed meaning on the Genesis stories. All of this makes for a fascinating new dance that offers fresh insights and questions for the reading of the biblical text.

If one is not naturally drawn to such detailed explorations of text and is wondering to what end is all this study and reflection, this wrestling with text and teachings, Jacobs offers us a possible response in her poem “How to Pray”: “The way to God / is not around the world but through it. So dig / your heels into your heels . . .” And ten lines later: “And, finally, be all skin: like a kid’s / face pressed to an aquarium window,” until your questioning and wondering leads you to realize, “It’s not God— / well, not exactly. It’s you. One breath deeper than you’ve / ever been, one breath closer to the heeded, heedful world.”

This entire collection of poems resonates with the essential questions and attempts at meaningful answers that humans have wrestled with for centuries. In her final poem, “Aliyah,” Jacobs writes about how so many of us are seeking:

A vantage we could not have reached
on our own, a vision otherwise beyond us
All of us, in that overstory, unalone.

In the “Notes” section at the end, Jacobs offers many pages of references and discussions for the surprising and meaningful poems she has presented, providing a Midrash of insights from Maimonides to the Babylonian Talmud to Robert Alter and Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, to the likes of Viktor E. Frankl and Stephen Mitchell, as well as references to other poets and poems. Additionally she offers insightful discussions of her (and others’) explications of many of the key ancient Hebrew words that illuminate the passages and stories she has called upon while writing these poems.

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Michael S. Glaser is professor emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and former poet laureate of Maryland (2004–2009). He has published seven books of his own poetry and edited four anthologies in addition to coediting The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965–2010 (BOA Editions, 2012). He lives in Hillsborough, N.C.