Uncle Feygele is a portrait of a poet poised between the ultra-Orthodox Jewish milieu in which he was raised and his queer daily life. Rather than highlighting displacement, the poems in this collection meditate on the challenges in sustaining familial and romantic connection and the hope for social justice. Despite his failure to fulfill the biblical injunction “to be fruitful and multiply,” the title protagonist grapples with questions of community, family, history, identity, and language. His quest is peopled by characters, “real” and imagined, historical and contemporary, who provide fellowship and inspiration. By probing the interior life of an uncoupled hero, the book shifts the persona of the “unmarried relative” from the periphery to the very center of investigation. Taken together, Uncle Feygele offers a new portrayal of a ubiquitous but often obscure literary figure and an alternative paradigm of Jewish engagement. Six poems also have a Yiddish version.
Read praise for Uncle Feygele
Purchase Uncle Feygele from Plain View Press
Inspired by the poet’s experience as an artist’s model, What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn is a kaleidoscope of mysterious tableaux vivants. Composed entirely of numbered five-line poems, the book offers glimpses of individuals in moments of flux or revelation and suggestions of lives altered. By drawing on the dramatic potential inherent in brevity, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub invites his readers to extend the narratives beyond the borders of the poems to imagined conclusions of their own. Each of the poems in What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn has English and Yiddish versions, and two poems also have a Hebrew version.
Read praise for What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn
Purchase What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn from Parlor Press or Amazon
The Insatiable Psalm explores the love between an ultra-Orthodox Jewish mother and her increasingly less observant son, while drawing upon themes in Jewish history and culture. As the two unnamed protagonists speak to each other across a widening philosophical divide, the book alternates between the voices of the mother, son, and the poet narrator. The first section follows a narrative arc of the mother’s life from girlhood and adolescence to marriage and motherhood to illness, and ultimately, death. It also tells the story of the son, who is beginning to envision the possibilities of a gay life. The second section examines some of the challenges in composing an homage in a context where it is neither sought nor admired. The mother, despite a yearning for romance and beauty, fiercely claims her faith, which she sees as a bulwark against communal and personal destruction. The son, in his newly acquired enthusiasm for feminist theory and liberation, must navigate the reality of a mother who is interested in neither. Their enduring love in the face of conflict gives the book its primary dramatic momentum. Rather than a readily apparent reconciliation, the book offers a conversation, an insistence on connection, despite difference.
Read praise for The Insatiable Psalm.
Purchase The Insatiable Psalm from Wind River Press or Amazon.
