Phoenicia Publishing
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PRINT EDITION: 88 pages; $12.00 (US, CAN); £7.42 UK; €8.88 EUROPE


ABOUT THE ARTIST:
MARY BOXLEY BULLINGTON

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A full-time artist working chiefly
in mixed media and collage, Mary Boxley Bullington has a
Ph. D. in medieval lit from Indiana University.  Her works
are included in the collections of Virginia Tech,
UVA Hospital, and many other private and corporate collections. She lives in Roanoke, VA.

The image on the cover of Waiting to Unfold is a detail from her mixed-media collage, "Creation," 2013.

Waiting to Unfold
by Rachel Barenblat

Waiting to Unfold offers an unflinching and honest look at the challenges and blessings of early parenthood.

Poet and rabbi Rachel Barenblat wrote one poem during each week of her son's first year of life, chronicling the wonder and the delight along with the pain of learning to nurse, the exhaustion of sleep deprivation, and the dark descent into -- and eventual ascent out of -- postpartum depression.

Barenblat brings her rabbinic training and deep spirituality to bear on this quintessential human experience. She also resists sentimentality or rosy soft-focus. While some of these are poems of wonder, others were written in the trenches.

These poems resist and refute the notion that anyone who doesn't savor every instant of exalted motherhood deserves stigma and shame. And they uncover the sweetness folded in with the bitter.

By turns serious and funny, aching and transcendent, these poems take an unflinching look at one woman's experience of becoming a mother.
These rich poems will carry you into the great timeless miracle and mystery of unfolding littleness, nonstop maternal alertness, beauty and exhaustion and amazing, exquisite tenderness, oh yes.
--Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Fuel and The Words Under the Words

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rachel Barenblat holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a Jewish Renewal rabbi, ordained by ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal in January of 2011. She serves Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, MA.

She is author of 70 Faces: Torah Poems (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011) as well as four chapbooks of poetry: "the skies here" (Pecan Grove Press, 1995), "What Stays" (Bennington Writing Seminars Alumni Chapbook Series, 2002), "chaplainbook" (Laupe House Press, 2006) and "Through," a self-published chapbook of miscarriage poems (2009).

Since 2003 she has blogged as The Velveteen Rabbi; in 2008, her blog was named one of the top 25 blogs on the internet by TIME. She is perhaps best known for "The Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach," which has been used in homes and synagogues worldwide.

Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, among them Phoebe, The Jewish Women's Literary Annual, The Texas Observer, and Confrontation.

She lives in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts with her husband Ethan Zuckerman, their son Drew, and their creamsicle cat. Find her online at velveteenrabbi.com.
The intense observation of the poet and the intense observation of the mother unite in a celebration of what is new and newborn, what is intensely felt and cherished and what is lost and mourned. Rachel Barenblat’s poems are easy to enter into, and they carry both the uniqueness of her persona as poet and serious Jew and the universality of love that has made us all. There’s a subversive wit here too,—a changing table that’s also a throne of glory, or the baby chewing on his mother’s tefillin—that speaks to a newly emerging sensibility about what is reverent and what is holy. It’s in the everyday as our best American poets have taught us, and as Rachel Barenblat teaches us in a new way too.
--Rodger Kamenetz, author of  The Jew in the Lotus and the lowercase jew
In these remarkable poems Rachel Barenblat traverses the world of first-time parenthood with insight, generosity, rare courage.  She shares first innocent awe, then unexpected darkness as a winter of the soul claims squatter’s rights in the nursery, and finally, aching, yearning, growing toward hope, a relearning of holy presence in small things.  New parents will be astonished that someone has found words for their deepest secrets, parents long past these early months will gratefully nod: yes, I remember, this is true.
--Merle Feld, author of A Spiritual Life: Exploring the Heart and Jewish Tradition and Finding Words