I love Paper Brigade, the literary journal published by the Jewish Book Council. Not long ago, the JBC launched a book club called “Nu Reads.” The name of the club is something of a pun; the word “nu” sounds like “new” and is a Yiddish interjection or question that means “so?” or “well?” And as part of the subscription for members of the book club, the JBC sends out a miniature version of the magazine called a Paper Brigade Short.

I have a poem from my manuscript, The Brief Temple Taken Down, which appears in the current Paper Brigade Short. “How” is a meditation on my husband’s recent fight with cancer and is inspired by the syntax of the Book of Lamentations, its use of anaphora, its handling of images of the demolished city, its anguished voice. In Hebrew, The Book of Lamentations is called Eikhah, which is the opening word of the text: How. As in, “How lonely lies the city / that once thronged with people!” This was an ancient practice for naming texts, and you can see it in the ways Jews reference the books of the Torah, Bereshit instead of Genesis, Shemot instead of Exodus, and so on.

“How” is an important poem for me. It marked a turning point in my ongoing efforts to bring together personal experience with a psalmist’s direct addresses to a divine interlocutor.  I wanted to write what’s known as a “city lament”–an elegy for a destroyed city–while keeping the poem closely tied to my own intimate fears and terror.  

You can read more about Nu Reads and Paper Brigade here.