88 pages, December 2020,  $15.95
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Tether

These letters, kite-string
or umbilicus: do they
tether you? When I
stop writing will you
dissolve, a water droplet
rejoining the flowing stream?
Maybe I’m the one
tied to what was,
not willing to disentangle.
When I wasn’t looking
this year changed me.
Still homesick sometimes, but
I’ve learned to sleep
in this strange bed
where sometimes, I know,
I will see you
in dreams. Gone but
still here. Almost enough.
Cover art: Elizabeth Adams

Crossing the Sea
by Rachel Barenblat

Heart-full, love-rich, rapt with intricate attention and memory, but never shirking the hard parts, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat shares a sequence of stunning poems  for her late mother. Her voice is honest as a tree.  This is an extremely moving book for anyone who has known grief,  and feels captivated by how the conversation goes on. 
--Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist and Transfer, among others
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat wrote Crossing the Sea during the Jewish tradition's first year of mourning between her mother's death and the unveiling of her headstone. In these poems, she traces the twists and turns of the mourner’s path, first remembering the circumstances of her mother’s last days, and then moving from the sharp pangs of early grief to times of introspection and memory, which again give way to a gradual acceptance of finality, and awareness of a new kind of continuity.

Is grief ever completely simple? As in her previous books about the Torah, and about birth and early motherhood, in Crossing the Sea Rachel takes apart a difficult subject. As both a daughter and a mother herself, she remembers and examines her relationship with her mother in all its fullness and complexity, acknowledging and lamenting its shortcomings and disappointments in both directions, while celebrating what was given, what was shared, and what was repaired over time. Because of that honesty, the reader is invited to accept their own imperfections and the imperfection of human relationships while navigating the very real and unpredictable waters of mourning.

Poignancy and regret are here, but also perseverance, humor, and vivid stories. Above all, these poems reveal a profound sense of humanity and the potential for continuing growth, even when one person in the relationship is no longer with us.

I knew Rachel’s mother. We came from the same small Texas town, ate the same mango mousse served in a fluted ring mold. Rachel captures the complexity of their relationship through similar telling descriptions and snippets of dialogue, then a miracle happens. My mother is there, too. Crossing the Sea moves past the personal as women readers identify and remember, laying these pebble poems on their own mothers’ stones.
 -- Nan Cuba, author of Body and Bread, winner of the PEN Southwest Award in Fiction
Rachel Barenblat’s poems open us to the heart of mourning: grappling with the loss of a parent, with whom our relationship was so close yet so complicated. She captures the tension between love and discord, the thrust and tug of distancing and reconciliation. She takes us with her on a winding path of grieving over the seasons of a year. Through that prism she refracts two lifetimes and three generations, rendering them with emotional honesty and insight. I was moved, I was brought back to my own loss, and I was brought a little closer to healing.
--Mark Nazimova, Jewish liturgist, NYC

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Rachel Barenblat, named in 2016 by The Forward as one of America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis, is a rabbi and spiritual director. She is a founding builder at Bayit: Building Jewish and serves as spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel (North Adams, MA).

She is author of five previous book-length collections of poetry: 70 Faces: Torah Poems (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011), Waiting to Unfold (Phoenicia, 2013), Toward Sinai: Omer Poems (Velveteen Rabbi, 2016), Open My Lips (Ben Yehuda Press, 2016), and Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda, 2018). In 2019 she edited Beside Still Waters: A Journey of Comfort and Renewal (Bayit and Ben Yehuda), a volume for the mourner’s path.

Since 2003 she has blogged as The Velveteen Rabbi, and in 2008, TIME named her blog one of the top 25 sites on the internet. Her work has appeared in Lilith, The Texas Observer, The Forward, and anthologies including The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (Bloomsbury), The Women’s Seder Sourcebook (Jewish Lights), and God? Jewish Choices for Struggling with the Ultimate (Torah Aura), among other places.

She has taught courses arising from the intersection of the literary life and the spiritual life for Bayit, the Academy for Spiritual Formation, the National Havurah institute (where she was digital Liturgist In Residence in 2020), and Beyond Walls, a writing program for clergy of many faiths at the Kenyon Institute.

Rachel lives in western Massachusetts with her son.