In March, Jessica Jacobs released her third poetry collection unalone. After seven years at work, her retelling of Genesis arrived on bookshelves. In between Isaac and Sarah and Noah and Joseph, Jacobs weaves her own history, truths, and dilemmas.
Be it through unalone or previous collections, there is a ferocity and tenderness to her poems that make room for curious minds to settle into the known and unknown. In teaching, she makes room for her students by showing how to find the good in an albeit prickly world. In leading, she makes room by nourishing Jewish storytelling at Yetzirah, a literary nonprofit she founded that supports Jewish poets. With chapters springing up throughout the U.S., and hot off the heels of their second Jewish Poetry Conference, the impact of Jacobs’s hearth for poetry will be felt by emerging and established poets for years to come.
During our conversation, Jacobs said that Genesis “is there to mirror you in wherever you are in the moment” and in this moment, we meet Jessica Jacobs, poet, teacher, and community leader, at home in Asheville, North Carolina.
Your first poetry collection, Pelvis with Distance, is centred on Georgia O’Keeffe, who is not God but a mystical-like figure, and your second collection, Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going, is more memoir-based. How did they both lead you to write unalone?
It’s funny, there are people in New Mexico who have truly built their lives around O’Keeffe in the way people build their lives around God.
When I went to New Mexico to write Pelvis with Distance, the experience of being in the desert and the research and experience of trying to write into a life and voice that wasn’t mine was very helpful when looking at biblical characters for unalone. To write that first book, I found a cabin in the high desert of Abiquiú, which is where O’Keeffe lived, and spent a month there alone. I wanted to be in the landscape and absorb it. I had a solar panel to power my laptop and that was the only electricity. There was no phone, no internet. My closest neighbours were five miles away. It was terrifying. We’re never alone like that in modern society. I was in my early 30s and really big questions came up because I couldn’t just drown them out with a movie on Netflix. I started to think about existential questions like, What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to live knowing you’re going to die?
And when I came back into the world, I was falling in love with the woman who for nearly the next decade would be my wife, which led to my second book, which asked: What does it mean to partner with someone and share your life with them? It was a practice in vulnerability, in trying to write even the more difficult parts of myself more honestly. If you’re going to immerse yourself in a religious text, that kind of openness is helpful.
In unalone, there are statements that inspire questions of morality for the reader and there are moments when you question morality. For instance, you write “It feels better to be kind / than right” and you ask “which is worse: to be guilty or powerless?” I don’t think either introduce questions that can be solved. Do you think they are supposed to be?
No, I don’t think they are. In a similar way, I couldn’t hand you the Torah and say these are the answers and be done. You need havruta [study partners]. You need to be in conversation with the text. You need to be in conversation with other people in the world. I’m grateful for being alive to these questions. Even if you never find a definitive answer, if you can sit down with someone and explore questions together and be in conversation, that’s when, to me, there’s intimacy and exchange that can alter you in significant ways.
How did working on the collection, over the course of seven years, change your relationship to these religious texts or even to God?
You asked how my relationship changed to the text—I had no relationship to the text. My relationship to the Hebrew Bible was through literature and literary allusions, but I had never really engaged directly with the texts at all. There is a mystical idea in Judaism that the Torah is a text without flaw. Yet the experience of sitting with a sacred text and approaching it as though it is perfect, was so hard for me. When I tried to read the Bible when I was younger, I would say it’s disturbing and patriarchal—which it is!—and then stop reading it. But to read it in a way that says if something feels bad, if I don’t understand it, then instead of setting it aside, I have to sit with the text long enough that it becomes my teacher, well that changed everything. That shift in relationship wasn’t easy. Yet, what I found was that the most disturbing stories for me, like the Akedah, The Binding of Isaac, led me to ask questions I wouldn’t have asked on my own, independent of the text.
The way I think about God and where I see God is in connection—with a piece of text or a piece of music or a beautiful trail in the mountains while I’m out running—all of which can bring me in closer relationship to myself. But it’s also sitting down with a havruta or someone I deeply care about and having a beautiful conversation. To me, that’s God. When I think I am being my most authentic self, when am I in service to something more than just myself.
You’re inviting those connections in as well by being open to your surroundings.
We’re living in a world right now that is always telling us to pay attention, which means pay attention to the thing I want you to and ignore everything else. When you sit with something that is as mysterious as the Torah, you have to crack yourself open and try and stay in that receptive state. It changes my poems and also how I am with other people because it helps me be more alive to the possibilities of who they are. It’s been an astonishing experience.
In unalone you also weave in the personal. Did you know that you would always include those experiences, for example, with or of your family, in conversation with Genesis?
When I first wrote Pelvis with Distance, it was accepted for publication with poems just in the voice of O’Keeffe and her husband Alfred Stieglitz. And I gave it to a dear friend, the poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, who said, “Okay, these are lovely. Good job. Congratulations. But why did you write this book? Why did you care enough about this person to write an entire book about her?” I had written a very long essay about my time in the desert and about the fact that I realized halfway through writing the book that I was trying to learn how to be an artist and to be a woman and an artist. So I took that essay and kind of exploded it into prose poems that I wove throughout the O’Keeffe poems. I bring this up because it helped me learn that a reader needs a way into the text where she can see herself in relationship to the text and hopefully, even if you haven’t had the experience I’ve had, it will trigger a memory in you from your own life.
Quite close to when I started writing this book, my mother was diagnosed with what eventually became dementia. Even when I was thinking about something from Genesis, I found that I also needed to write about that experience of loss both to better understand it and to set some of that weight down on the page. So sometimes, in ways like that, parts of my life would insist themselves into poems.
You also write about your relationship to Florida.
There’s a lot of Florida.
How does it inform your work?
Working on my second book, I was irritated because I thought I was going to write love poems and all these Florida poems kept popping up. For me, Florida is childhood, foundational. I will never live there again but there’s a part of me that always will. I can also appreciate it much more now that I get to come and go as I please. In The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean she talks about how miraculous it is that anyone survives in Florida because the nature in Florida wants to eat you.
Not just alligators.
Nope. There’s a wildness there so weirdly hidden and tamed by concrete and neon and parking lots and mowed lawns—sinkholes, water moccasins, and, back in the day, malaria-laden mosquitoes. Yet, I always wanted to find the wildness. I was always the strange kid who was off in the woods getting attacked by bugs. I was a bit of a jock but I also loved words and wanted to know the world that seemed to be so much bigger and better than the one I saw in front of me. Books were what told me that one day it was going to be like that. A huge part of why I became a writer was so that maybe, one day, somebody who also feels kind of isolated and strange might find something I wrote and feel less alone. Which is why I want a poem, for the most part, to live in the concrete, sensual world. Wherever I am, I want to learn the names of the flowers and the mountains because I want there to be air someone can breathe in that poem.
Turning back to the biblical, I didn’t know about Sarah Bat Asher, the Torah’s first poet, until unalone. It was so exciting to learn about her. What was the moment you discovered her like and how did it make you feel against your own perspective of your life as an artist?
I loved learning about her because she could speak so beautifully she’d never taste death. Were that the case for any of us writers! One of the things that felt revolutionary when thinking about the legend, or the story of Sarah Bat Asher, is that because she doesn’t die she gets to go through history and be this link of continuity throughout incredibly important moments in Jewish history.
Writing this book changed the way I think about time because it freed me from feeling stuck in this one historic moment. When you really immerse yourself in the Torah, you get to time travel—you get to wander around in the far past and also imagine yourself into possible futures. It feels like this really lovely unmooring from being temporally bound.
That’s the power of storytelling and language. Speaking of language, you deep dive into certain words and their meaning. For instance, about how the Hebrew word tayva can mean both ark and word. Is poetry and language an ark? Can it save people in the same way?
On my most hopeful days, I want to believe that is true. For instance, writing this book told me I needed a community that didn’t exist. Which led me to found Yetzirah. I think that Yetzirah, especially since this past October, has—I’m not going to say saved people—but I think it’s given people a tremendous amount of solace and companionship that they wouldn’t have had otherwise, allowing people in our community to feel far less alone. From October 7 through the end of the year, I was getting either a phone call or an email nearly every day from someone who felt scared and isolated. And because of Yetzirah, I could say to them, “Oh, you’re in LA, here’s someone I can introduce you to.” “You’re in Vermont, here’s someone nearby.”
Having been on tour since the book came out in March, it’s been inspiring to be in conversation with people around these poems, and I’ve also been teaching writing about spirituality and religion through poetry for the last eight years. Both of these experiences have offered beautiful moments of connection.
I come to these texts in many ways as an outsider. I come as a woman. I come as a queer person. I come as someone with no real religious background and, at the same time, this text is mine, this tradition is mine. I will find a way to allow it to speak in a way that nurtures me. So what I do when I’m having conversations with people around these poems or teaching these classes, and it’s often with people of many different spiritual traditions, is to share my experience with them as an invitation for them to find their own paths to connection. For so many people, religion is a place of great wounding and something they feel they have to walk away from because it’s done them so much harm. Yet they often share the lack this leaving has left in them. So we often explore the question, “What if you could take from this what you need and put the other stuff aside?” I think there’s some saving quality in that.
Do you find writers feel their Judaism is separate to their craft or even that they have to keep it separated?
I published my first two books and I never talked directly about Judaism. As someone living a very secular life, I didn’t think about it. Yet I can look back at those books and say they’re influenced by Jewish cultural concerns, even though I wasn’t aware of that.
We had a number of Modern Orthodox folks and Hasidic folks at both of Yetzirah’s Jewish poetry conferences, and as Judaism is an essential part of their lives, it’s also an essential part of their poems. Yet I don’t think a lot of secular Jewish writers often feel comfortable bringing those two parts of themselves—the Jew and the poet—together in a conscious or public way. Yet, after the shared week of our conference, many less observant poets said it gave them both a sense of permission and an excitement to approach Judaism more directly in their writing.
The primary question I got in our first year was, “Am I Jewish enough to be a part of this?” Which was painful to me to feel the often harmful gatekeeping that had inspired such a deep sense of doubt and also hilarious because who am I to answer such a question?! As a large part of me had wondered if I was Jewish enough to found a Jewish literary organization, I was thankfully able to say to them, Hey, here I am. If you identify as a Jewish poet, then that’s more than enough; welcome. And we also invite friends from all traditions to join us for our public events.
In Judaism you have this gorgeous poetic tradition, as well as a tradition of wisdom and question-asking and wrestling with God. Poetry brought me back to Judaism. Judaism, in turn, has deepened and expanded my poetry. And my community, too.
In the proem you write, “Let us honour what we love / by taking it in.” What are the things you love most about Judaism and literature?
That’s like asking me who my favourite poet is! I love that there’s no original sin. We can be guilty but we’re not sinful. It makes repentance truly possible. We are Israelites (a translation of Israel is “one who wrestles with the divine”), we are Godwrestlers, we are not expected to passively receive these texts and toe the line, we’re expected to engage with them. And the idea that if you sit down to study Torah with another person, the Shekhinah, the presence of God, sits with you, is spectacular.
And what do you hope people take in and love about the work you’ve built your life around?
If nothing else, if I could hand unalone to someone and pray they get something from it, it would be the urge to ask more questions, to ask big questions, to ask for what truly matters to them and to others. And to then, maybe, be moved to go to a text they hold sacred and spend the time with it necessary to take it in and let it change them. It might be scary and it might mean that you have to change your life in some significant ways, but if you’re asking questions from an honest, authentic place, in my experience, it’s going to be worth it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In March, Jessica Jacobs released her third poetry collection unalone. After seven years at work, her retelling of Genesis arrived on bookshelves. In between Isaac and Sarah and Noah and Joseph, Jacobs weaves her own history, truths, and dilemmas.
Be it through unalone or previous collections, there is a ferocity and tenderness to her poems that make room for curious minds to settle into the known and unknown. In teaching, she makes room for her students by showing how to find the good in an albeit prickly world. In leading, she makes room by nourishing Jewish storytelling at Yetzirah, a literary nonprofit she founded that supports Jewish poets. With chapters springing up throughout the U.S., and hot off the heels of their second Jewish Poetry Conference, the impact of Jacobs’s hearth for poetry will be felt by emerging and established poets for years to come.
During our conversation, Jacobs said that Genesis “is there to mirror you in wherever you are in the moment” and in this moment, we meet Jessica Jacobs, poet, teacher, and community leader, at home in Asheville, North Carolina.
Your first poetry collection, Pelvis with Distance, is centred on Georgia O’Keeffe, who is not God but a mystical-like figure, and your second collection, Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going, is more memoir-based. How did they both lead you to write unalone?
It’s funny, there are people in New Mexico who have truly built their lives around O’Keeffe in the way people build their lives around God.
When I went to New Mexico to write Pelvis with Distance, the experience of being in the desert and the research and experience of trying to write into a life and voice that wasn’t mine was very helpful when looking at biblical characters for unalone. To write that first book, I found a cabin in the high desert of Abiquiú, which is where O’Keeffe lived, and spent a month there alone. I wanted to be in the landscape and absorb it. I had a solar panel to power my laptop and that was the only electricity. There was no phone, no internet. My closest neighbours were five miles away. It was terrifying. We’re never alone like that in modern society. I was in my early 30s and really big questions came up because I couldn’t just drown them out with a movie on Netflix. I started to think about existential questions like, What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to live knowing you’re going to die?
And when I came back into the world, I was falling in love with the woman who for nearly the next decade would be my wife, which led to my second book, which asked: What does it mean to partner with someone and share your life with them? It was a practice in vulnerability, in trying to write even the more difficult parts of myself more honestly. If you’re going to immerse yourself in a religious text, that kind of openness is helpful.
In unalone, there are statements that inspire questions of morality for the reader and there are moments when you question morality. For instance, you write “It feels better to be kind / than right” and you ask “which is worse: to be guilty or powerless?” I don’t think either introduce questions that can be solved. Do you think they are supposed to be?
No, I don’t think they are. In a similar way, I couldn’t hand you the Torah and say these are the answers and be done. You need havruta [study partners]. You need to be in conversation with the text. You need to be in conversation with other people in the world. I’m grateful for being alive to these questions. Even if you never find a definitive answer, if you can sit down with someone and explore questions together and be in conversation, that’s when, to me, there’s intimacy and exchange that can alter you in significant ways.
How did working on the collection, over the course of seven years, change your relationship to these religious texts or even to God?
You asked how my relationship changed to the text—I had no relationship to the text. My relationship to the Hebrew Bible was through literature and literary allusions, but I had never really engaged directly with the texts at all. There is a mystical idea in Judaism that the Torah is a text without flaw. Yet the experience of sitting with a sacred text and approaching it as though it is perfect, was so hard for me. When I tried to read the Bible when I was younger, I would say it’s disturbing and patriarchal—which it is!—and then stop reading it. But to read it in a way that says if something feels bad, if I don’t understand it, then instead of setting it aside, I have to sit with the text long enough that it becomes my teacher, well that changed everything. That shift in relationship wasn’t easy. Yet, what I found was that the most disturbing stories for me, like the Akedah, The Binding of Isaac, led me to ask questions I wouldn’t have asked on my own, independent of the text.
The way I think about God and where I see God is in connection—with a piece of text or a piece of music or a beautiful trail in the mountains while I’m out running—all of which can bring me in closer relationship to myself. But it’s also sitting down with a havruta or someone I deeply care about and having a beautiful conversation. To me, that’s God. When I think I am being my most authentic self, when am I in service to something more than just myself.
You’re inviting those connections in as well by being open to your surroundings.
We’re living in a world right now that is always telling us to pay attention, which means pay attention to the thing I want you to and ignore everything else. When you sit with something that is as mysterious as the Torah, you have to crack yourself open and try and stay in that receptive state. It changes my poems and also how I am with other people because it helps me be more alive to the possibilities of who they are. It’s been an astonishing experience.
In unalone you also weave in the personal. Did you know that you would always include those experiences, for example, with or of your family, in conversation with Genesis?
When I first wrote Pelvis with Distance, it was accepted for publication with poems just in the voice of O’Keeffe and her husband Alfred Stieglitz. And I gave it to a dear friend, the poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, who said, “Okay, these are lovely. Good job. Congratulations. But why did you write this book? Why did you care enough about this person to write an entire book about her?” I had written a very long essay about my time in the desert and about the fact that I realized halfway through writing the book that I was trying to learn how to be an artist and to be a woman and an artist. So I took that essay and kind of exploded it into prose poems that I wove throughout the O’Keeffe poems. I bring this up because it helped me learn that a reader needs a way into the text where she can see herself in relationship to the text and hopefully, even if you haven’t had the experience I’ve had, it will trigger a memory in you from your own life.
Quite close to when I started writing this book, my mother was diagnosed with what eventually became dementia. Even when I was thinking about something from Genesis, I found that I also needed to write about that experience of loss both to better understand it and to set some of that weight down on the page. So sometimes, in ways like that, parts of my life would insist themselves into poems.
You also write about your relationship to Florida.
There’s a lot of Florida.
How does it inform your work?
Working on my second book, I was irritated because I thought I was going to write love poems and all these Florida poems kept popping up. For me, Florida is childhood, foundational. I will never live there again but there’s a part of me that always will. I can also appreciate it much more now that I get to come and go as I please. In The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean she talks about how miraculous it is that anyone survives in Florida because the nature in Florida wants to eat you.
Not just alligators.
Nope. There’s a wildness there so weirdly hidden and tamed by concrete and neon and parking lots and mowed lawns—sinkholes, water moccasins, and, back in the day, malaria-laden mosquitoes. Yet, I always wanted to find the wildness. I was always the strange kid who was off in the woods getting attacked by bugs. I was a bit of a jock but I also loved words and wanted to know the world that seemed to be so much bigger and better than the one I saw in front of me. Books were what told me that one day it was going to be like that. A huge part of why I became a writer was so that maybe, one day, somebody who also feels kind of isolated and strange might find something I wrote and feel less alone. Which is why I want a poem, for the most part, to live in the concrete, sensual world. Wherever I am, I want to learn the names of the flowers and the mountains because I want there to be air someone can breathe in that poem.
Turning back to the biblical, I didn’t know about Sarah Bat Asher, the Torah’s first poet, until unalone. It was so exciting to learn about her. What was the moment you discovered her like and how did it make you feel against your own perspective of your life as an artist?
I loved learning about her because she could speak so beautifully she’d never taste death. Were that the case for any of us writers! One of the things that felt revolutionary when thinking about the legend, or the story of Sarah Bat Asher, is that because she doesn’t die she gets to go through history and be this link of continuity throughout incredibly important moments in Jewish history.
Writing this book changed the way I think about time because it freed me from feeling stuck in this one historic moment. When you really immerse yourself in the Torah, you get to time travel—you get to wander around in the far past and also imagine yourself into possible futures. It feels like this really lovely unmooring from being temporally bound.
That’s the power of storytelling and language. Speaking of language, you deep dive into certain words and their meaning. For instance, about how the Hebrew word tayva can mean both ark and word. Is poetry and language an ark? Can it save people in the same way?
On my most hopeful days, I want to believe that is true. For instance, writing this book told me I needed a community that didn’t exist. Which led me to found Yetzirah. I think that Yetzirah, especially since this past October, has—I’m not going to say saved people—but I think it’s given people a tremendous amount of solace and companionship that they wouldn’t have had otherwise, allowing people in our community to feel far less alone. From October 7 through the end of the year, I was getting either a phone call or an email nearly every day from someone who felt scared and isolated. And because of Yetzirah, I could say to them, “Oh, you’re in LA, here’s someone I can introduce you to.” “You’re in Vermont, here’s someone nearby.”
Having been on tour since the book came out in March, it’s been inspiring to be in conversation with people around these poems, and I’ve also been teaching writing about spirituality and religion through poetry for the last eight years. Both of these experiences have offered beautiful moments of connection.
I come to these texts in many ways as an outsider. I come as a woman. I come as a queer person. I come as someone with no real religious background and, at the same time, this text is mine, this tradition is mine. I will find a way to allow it to speak in a way that nurtures me. So what I do when I’m having conversations with people around these poems or teaching these classes, and it’s often with people of many different spiritual traditions, is to share my experience with them as an invitation for them to find their own paths to connection. For so many people, religion is a place of great wounding and something they feel they have to walk away from because it’s done them so much harm. Yet they often share the lack this leaving has left in them. So we often explore the question, “What if you could take from this what you need and put the other stuff aside?” I think there’s some saving quality in that.
Do you find writers feel their Judaism is separate to their craft or even that they have to keep it separated?
I published my first two books and I never talked directly about Judaism. As someone living a very secular life, I didn’t think about it. Yet I can look back at those books and say they’re influenced by Jewish cultural concerns, even though I wasn’t aware of that.
We had a number of Modern Orthodox folks and Hasidic folks at both of Yetzirah’s Jewish poetry conferences, and as Judaism is an essential part of their lives, it’s also an essential part of their poems. Yet I don’t think a lot of secular Jewish writers often feel comfortable bringing those two parts of themselves—the Jew and the poet—together in a conscious or public way. Yet, after the shared week of our conference, many less observant poets said it gave them both a sense of permission and an excitement to approach Judaism more directly in their writing.
The primary question I got in our first year was, “Am I Jewish enough to be a part of this?” Which was painful to me to feel the often harmful gatekeeping that had inspired such a deep sense of doubt and also hilarious because who am I to answer such a question?! As a large part of me had wondered if I was Jewish enough to found a Jewish literary organization, I was thankfully able to say to them, Hey, here I am. If you identify as a Jewish poet, then that’s more than enough; welcome. And we also invite friends from all traditions to join us for our public events.
In Judaism you have this gorgeous poetic tradition, as well as a tradition of wisdom and question-asking and wrestling with God. Poetry brought me back to Judaism. Judaism, in turn, has deepened and expanded my poetry. And my community, too.
In the proem you write, “Let us honour what we love / by taking it in.” What are the things you love most about Judaism and literature?
That’s like asking me who my favourite poet is! I love that there’s no original sin. We can be guilty but we’re not sinful. It makes repentance truly possible. We are Israelites (a translation of Israel is “one who wrestles with the divine”), we are Godwrestlers, we are not expected to passively receive these texts and toe the line, we’re expected to engage with them. And the idea that if you sit down to study Torah with another person, the Shekhinah, the presence of God, sits with you, is spectacular.
And what do you hope people take in and love about the work you’ve built your life around?
If nothing else, if I could hand unalone to someone and pray they get something from it, it would be the urge to ask more questions, to ask big questions, to ask for what truly matters to them and to others. And to then, maybe, be moved to go to a text they hold sacred and spend the time with it necessary to take it in and let it change them. It might be scary and it might mean that you have to change your life in some significant ways, but if you’re asking questions from an honest, authentic place, in my experience, it’s going to be worth it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.