The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards : Poems / Rachel Mennies ; Introduction by Robert A. Fink.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mennies, Rachel, author.

Series:

Walt McDonald First-Book Series.

Walt McDonald First-Book Series

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Physical Description:

xix, 79 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Lubbock : Texas Tech University Press, [2014]

Summary:

"Coming of age as a Jewish woman in America In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young woman's relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love, and female sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to "our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies," a force somehow responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines survival, assimilation, and intermarriage, subjects bound together by complex, if sometimes compromised, ties to the speaker's Judaism. Through wit and careful prosody, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards lays bare the struggles and triumphs experienced through a teenage girl's coming of age, showing the reader what it means to become-and remain-a Jewish woman in America"-- Provided by publisher.

""Twenty-third winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry."--Provided by publisher"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

I The Glad Hand

Learning to Multiply 7

Matriarch 8

The Jewish Woman in America, 2010 9

II The Glass Overcoat

The Jewish Woman in America, 1941 13

Schönwetter & Grünewald, Coatmakers 14

The Will of God 15

The Glass Overcoat 16

How Grandmother Paid Her Passage to New York 17

The Creation of Temple Beth Sholom 18

Grandfather Loses His First Wife 19

The Jewish Profession 22

Grandfather Onion 23

For Rose 24

Grandfather Shoemaker 25

Four Thousand Shoes 26

Philadelphia Woman 27

Inheritance 28

Yahrzeit 30

III The Book, Open

How to Make a Jewish Poem 33

The Storytelling Disease 34

The Uptown Lady and the Downtown Woman 36

In Preparation 37

The Joke 39

I Learn of Slaughter 41

Story from Another Inquisition 42

The Gossips 43

Yahrzeit 44

I Don't Know the Story, But I Can Tell the Story 45

IV Elijah

Huevos for Seder 49

The Memory of the Witness 58

V The Jewish Woman in America Solomon 61

Amidah for Teenage Girls 62

How to Make a Jewish Marriage, 1949 64

First Gentile 65

To Those Still Godless 66

My Sister the Diviner 67

How Will You Raise Your Children? 68

My Sister the Abacus 69

Eating Animals without Faces 71

A Creature of All Scripture 72

Rapture 73

The Jewish Woman Remembers Deuteronomy 6:6-9 74.

ISBN:

9780896728547

0896728544

OCLC:

856054861