How do we make sense of our complex, conflict-ridden world? How to walk amid long-standing issues that challenge us both as humans and as humanity? Jessica Jacobs goes back to the beginning, turning to Genesis, not so much for answers but in search of “better questions.” In Jacobs’s third collection, unalone: Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis (Four Way Books, 2024), she writes of love and loss, climate and mass shootings. Jacobs examines the darkness both outside herself and beneath her own skin, all through the lens of Torah, the study of which she likens to prayer. A wise and worthy guide, Jacobs’s poems are generous invitations to journey past chain links and picket fences, beyond all barriers and into ancient terrain. The collection is a testament to how unalone we really are, always traveling in the company of teachers and peers who came before and stand beside us.
I spoke via Zoom with Jacobs, winner of the New Mexico Book Award, finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and founder and executive director of Yetzirah, a hearth for Jewish poetry, about turning to Torah, making old stories new, and the struggle to do better, to live in step and in line with the values of service.
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The Rumpus: Let’s start at the beginning. Why Genesis?
Jessica Jacobs: I began this study not to write a book but because as I entered my early thirties, I wanted to have a basic understanding of Torah. Where better to begin than the beginning? I realized I’d been reading glimpses of and allusions to this text my whole life, foundational as it is for Western literature. How wonderful to finally drink right from the source!
Rumpus: Why did you start reading Torah in your thirties?
Jacobs: I ran as far from Torah as I could as a young person. I was raised in very conservative central Florida, in a secular Jewish household where Jewish culture was important but Jewish tradition and texts were not. My family all came from what at the time was Poland and is now Lithuania, during the pogroms, so Judaism was primarily presented to me as a lineage of trauma. Trauma, of course, is part of Judaism, but so are argument, awe, and wisdom. The Judaism I was given was also one of patriarchy; I didn’t see a woman carry a Torah until I was in my mid-twenties. So I didn’t see a place for myself as a woman, especially not as a queer woman.
Then, just as I turned thirty, I left a corporate publishing career to get my MFA. I ended up spending a month alone in the high desert of New Mexico to write my first book, which is largely about the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. I didn’t yet know that going to the desert as a seeker was a biblical act. My closest neighbors were five miles away—a solitude I think very few of us can find these days—and being so alone, big questions came up. I looked to poetry and novels, but they didn’t feel like enough. So I started seeking out wisdom literature: Torah, the teachings of Buddhism, the Jesuits. I cast a wide net but ultimately found I wanted to delve into my own tradition.
Rumpus: Your first poem, “Stepping Through the Gate” is a wonderful introduction to the collection. You say, “Sometimes barriers grow so large, it’s hard to see / what they’re protecting. . . . Let every fence in my mind have a gate.” Why is it important to address the barriers you experienced accessing the Bible?
Jacobs: I think the idea of gatekeeping was the way religion was taught to me. It was, “You need to follow these rules. You need to believe these things.” I’m very bad at following rules. I didn’t know what I believed—and still don’t! I want room to ask questions and to be in conversation with people I don’t necessarily agree with. That was not the Judaism of my childhood, so I needed to come back to it on my own terms. I needed people like Alicia Ostriker, like Avivah Zornberg, to say, “This is for everyone. Literature can be a part of it. Feminism can be a part of it. The body can be a part of it.” That felt really important as well. I hope that coming as an outsider allows me to perhaps find surprising pathways into the text.
Rumpus: Your book follows a very rich tradition of midrash. Can you explain a little bit about the tradition and how you use poems to make your own meanings of the text and your life?
Jacobs: Classical Midrash is centuries of rabbis delving into the Torah to find how this potentially fixed text keeps opening, how it stays alive by speaking to our current moment. Now there’s an incredible tradition of artists doing the same thing. Not just writers but visual artists, musicians, dancers, everyone looking at these texts and saying, “How does this speak to me? How can it help inform and form my life?”
What I was interested in, especially when I returned from the desert, was not finding answers but learning to ask better questions. Torah has helped me do this, in part by forcing me to look at things from which it would be much easier to turn away. Entering into an ancient conversation also gives a more expansive sense of time and what matters within it, what lasts. It teaches [us] to be less reactive, to ask instead how a moment fits into a historical pattern, and how we might better look forward by first looking back.
Rumpus: The language of Genesis, and the Bible in general, is very sparse with little exposition or reflection, but you take on some critical issues affecting us all, such as climate change, economic inequality, and injustice. How does the speaker compare and contrast the issues in her own personal life with sacred texts?
Jacobs: Speaking to a text like the Torah has power similar to the use of metaphor. Like metaphor, it gives you a richer, more complex field in which to communicate, a means of comparison, which then creates a vehicle in which you can carry different meanings across to a reader in a powerful way.
Yet there’s a danger when something’s too familiar: “Oh, I’ve heard that story before.” When you have a text as old and charged as the Hebrew Bible, it carries a lot more weight if you can find a way to make it new. So I became interested in finding a back door into these stories, a surprising detail, in-between the lines. I could pair what I’d found in this archetypal tale with something personal from my own life, making it better able to speak to others’ lives.
The shiny object of the flood is the ark, right? Two by two, all that stuff. But when you widen that lens a bit, you see all those people drowning in the waters around its hull—those people for whom there wasn’t room, perhaps the animals too—which speaks to this current moment of mass extinctions. I started reading UN reports on the impact of the climate crisis on those who can least afford to deal with it and who did the least to cause it. All these island nations that are likely going to be underwater within the next twenty or thirty years.
By interpreting the Pharaoh’s dreams, Joseph helped save Egypt during a famine. Because Egypt was the only place with food and water, Joseph’s family, who had once cast him out, was forced to go there to get food to survive. This ultimately resulted in their enslavement. It made me think of all the people who come to the US to survive, only to end up working backbreaking jobs for poverty wages. Joseph’s family, in my mind, is the archetype of this moment, the first climate refugees on record.
Rumpus: Yours is a very human collection, exploring our place in this world but also our responsibility to it. How do you see our responsibilities reflected in your poems?
Jacobs: That’s a big question. We were just speaking about more universal and historic concerns, yet one of the greatest challenges and gifts of writing this book was that it forced me to look at not just the darkest parts of the world but the darkest parts of myself. It’s so easy to judge others, but through the course of writing unalone, I tried to turn my judgment inward to discern how I might live a life better aligned with my values, in which I might live in service to more than just myself.
One of the stories with which I most struggled was the binding of Isaac. In the midrash, I saw rabbis contorting themselves in an effort to explain why Abraham was right in his willingness to sacrifice his son. This made me angry, sad, horrified—you name it. Yet because I felt compelled to continue wrestling with it, to not just walk away, ultimately, it made me ask myself, “What are times when I felt I had to do something, even if I suspected it was wrong?” When I looked at questions like that, it was painful. I can honestly say that writing these poems has changed my life.
Rumpus: How?
Jacobs: It’s helped me see how things don’t happen in isolation, but as part of a pattern. They’ve helped me to slow down, and instead of just getting angry and reacting, I try to ask myself how this might be an opportunity to learn something. How am I complicit in this moment? How might I do better the next time I’m faced with a similar moment of choice? This is the Jewish idea of teshuva, of repentance, a turning and a returning to something. Writing these poems has also guided me toward becoming, I hope, a better teacher and listener, guiding my poems and my thinking in surprising new directions. This is one of the reasons I founded Yetzirah, a community for Jewish poets. I wanted to have that conversation with others, to say, “Hey, maybe you too have felt shut out from this material. Let’s walk through the gates together.”
Rumpus: In my personal experience and recently on a more global level, I feel this line from “After the Flood” so deeply: “And trust after betrayal is not belief, but hope.”
Are you hopeful at this moment? What gives you the courage to hope in the face of betrayal?
Jacobs: As the director of a Jewish organization, since October 7, 2023, I have struggled deeply with acts I want to say are inhumane but are obviously deeply human as humans are the ones inflicting these horrors. It’s been difficult to navigate this time, personally and professionally. Yet one thing I feel privileged to be witnessing is the group email thread between the thirty-six participants at our inaugural poetry conference last summer. At first, they were celebrating each other’s work and sharing resources. Since October 7, they’ve also shared their heartache and questions. They have very different opinions and positions on what’s happening, yet have responded to each other with real curiosity, respect, and care.
To me, this is deeply hopeful. It’s proof to me that if we can slow down and see each other as full people, we can’t dismiss someone as an enemy. Even if we don’t agree with them, they’re worthy of respectful listening and thoughtful response.
Another thing currently giving me hope is the very strange experience of discovering that the poet Philip Metres and I both selected the exact same image by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota for our book covers. [My book] unalone will be out in March, and Phil’s Fugitive/Refuge in April. In addition to being a phenomenal poet and thinker, Phil is also an Arab-American professor at John Carroll University, a Jesuit institution, where he directs the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program. This felt like the universe saying, “You have a choice: you can be upset and dejected about sharing your cover image, or you can lean into this as a beautiful quirk of fate that allows the two of you, who might at first seem to have two very different lived experiences, to explore the powerful resonances in your work and lives.”
Rumpus: How’s that going?
Jacobs: It’s been beautiful, actually. I’ve already learned a great deal from getting to know Phil and immersing myself in his essays and poems. A written conversation we had over the holidays will be in the next issue of Image.
Rumpus: There’s personal mourning and anticipatory grief in the collection. You write so beautifully about your family, your mom who has dementia, your dad, your grandmother Bernice, your beloved dog. Is there anything you learned from Genesis that has helped you mourn or look at grief differently?
Jacobs: While my grandmother has the benefit of being nearly ninety-nine years old, she’s also lived a life that has brought her joy. She often says she’s at peace with death. When it comes, she’s told me, she’s ready for it. That’s a model of how I’d like to be.
My mother’s lack of acceptance—of illness, of death—has led to a lack of closure for me and those who love her. We didn’t have many of the conversations I’d have hoped for when she was still in a cognitive place to have them. Yet the Torah, with stories like that of Isaac grieving for his mother, Sarah, helped me feel a little less alone and isolated in my grief.
Rumpus: I found “Why There Is No Hebrew Word for Obey” extremely powerful. First, I didn’t know that the day of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting coincided with the parsha [the weekly Torah portion] of the binding of Isaac. You examine this terrible and tragic irony and then turn the lens onto yourself. You write, “My daily gods / are minor ones: of pride, of lust / of impatience and complacency.” Not a bad list! What have you learned from the Torah about the dangers of interpreting what we think of as God’s words?
Jacobs: The study of this text and the writing of these poems feel inextricably bound together. Writing the poems is a way of studying. When I say the experience has changed me, this poem is at the center of that change. I often think that once we arrive at our opinion or position on something, it can become our God. We no longer question it. Yet I think doubt is part of the vitality of belief. Every time I’m oh so sure of something, I need to take a beat and ask, “Okay, but what if it were otherwise?” Maybe I’ll go ahead as planned, but in all likelihood, I’m going to course correct a bit. Even if that just means that instead of making a statement, I’ll ask a question.
Rumpus: You said writing these poems is your way of studying. Is it also your way of talking to God? Are these poems your prayers?
Jacobs: What a beautiful question. I think so, and it’s not just the writing of the poems, it’s the study, it’s being in conversation with these texts. For the last seven years or so, I’ve been teaching courses on exploring spirituality and religion through poetry. Teaching for me is another form of prayer, a communal prayer we construct and say together. I’m about to go on tour, and I suspect reading and discussing these poems and learning about the lives of those I meet will feel like prayer as well.
Since college, I’ve gotten used to people coming out to me in terms of their sexuality. Now, when I’m reading these poems, say in a bar, there’s almost always someone far cooler looking than I, who comes up and says quietly, “I used to go to Bible school and still think about it all the time.” Another coming out process! And I’m here for it.
Rumpus: I love the title: unalone. How did you come up with it?
Jacobs: I came to the title because of the beautiful fact that I’m not alone. Poetry has brought me many of the best people in my life, and one of those is the poet Matthew Olzmann, who read the entire manuscript, which I thought was complete. He said his one disappointment was that he thought I was going to write a poem that told a reader why I wrote the book and what it meant to me. Imperative in hand, I sat down and wrote that poem in one sitting (something that almost never happens for me), and the gift of it was that final word: unalone. I had nearly thirty possible titles for this book, but that one word summarized everything I had learned. We are not alone in this historical moment. We are not alone in our lives. Whether or not we believe in a divine presence, there is an energy that connects us to the natural world and to each other.
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Author photograph courtesy of Jessica Jacobs
