unalone

As with her LJ best-booked Take Me with You, Wherever You Are Going, Jacobs delivers acute observation via urgent, colloquial language, here exploring her movement toward God as she reinvestigates the Judaism in which she was raised—“not a faith / but a tradition.” What emerges is a sense of God in the world, as exemplified by the poem “Ordinary Immanence,” about that moment when she realizes “I want/to believe in God. Just like that—a new door / in a room I thought I knew by heart.” Proceeding through Genesis in poems introduced by biblical, scholarly, or poetic quotations and plumbing the multiple meanings of numerous Hebrew words, Jacobs offers poems of connection (“Lonely lighthouses, / each of us.… We long to chorus”), finding and making oneself (“the growing up, growing / away, or, worst, not growing at all”), language (“perfectly imperfect, each of us / is a new way of saying”), love and desire (with Isaac and Rebecca refracted through a queer sensibility), plus free will, women’s roles, and the touching idea that paradise is “every moment we’ve ever left, the small / unnoticed garden.”