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