Saturday Review: “‘so many there with me‘” a review by Catherine Carter in NCLR Online Spring 2025 of Jessica Jacobs’s poetry collection unalone: Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis (2024)
Carter starts her review of Jacobs’s collection calling the poems “conversations, in a sense drawn from the rich Hebrew tradition of midrash, an ancient and multivalent collection of later commentaries on the stories of the Torah.” Carter then explains that midrash is “a bit like dinner at a large family reunion, where that family’s accumulated histories and stories are retold and re-remembered, argued over, interpreted and counter-interpreted, mined for their meanings to those alive in the present moment – meanings which, in the next generation, may well be revisited from still newer perspectives.”
Jacobs gets her inspiration for her collection directly from the book of Genesis and beautifully creates poetry inspired by it. Carter writes, “The book is divided into twelve sections, based on the first few words, or parashot, of each of the first stories of the Book of Genesis, like “Go forth” or “And he appeared.” Some of the poems are persona poems, written in the voices of Torah figures like Sarah or the undying Serah. But the sections also illuminate the tendrils and roots which connect all these stories and voices to the poet’s own family and experiences, and to the world we all inhabit together.”
Carter wraps up the review praising the collection for being “dazzling, gorgeous, thoughtful, spiritual, relevant, and even fun.” She encourages us “to read it with a friend, or a few friends, and as you read, to talk about what you find there. Together.”
Read the entire review here while awaiting the Spring 2025 issue, and order the book from Bookshop.org.
