Yetzirah Featured Poet: Marcela Sulak
Our featured poet this week is Marcela Sulak– writer, translator, and director of The Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University, the only creative writing graduate program in the world with a Jewish/Israeli focus. About the poems in her most recent book, City of Skypapers (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), Stephanie Burt writes, “They tolerate and sometimes love their Jerusalem, ‘full of inadvisable faith,’ even as they reach out to Tel Aviv in sonnets, to America in letters, to Gaza, to the clouds. They can help, now. And there is nothing much like them.”
Learn more about Marcela Sulak here and follow her on Facebook.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/ PenguinRand...
Reflections
Think about it
What makes this a “Jewish poem”, if at all?
Shekhinah
Shekhinah means "dwelling" or "settling"; the idea of Gd being a place. Shekhinah also means the "divine feminine" in contemporary discourse. Which interpretations can be read into the poem? What parts of this poem invoke different meanings of Shekhinah?
Poetry and Prayer
The title of this poem is "Shekhinah, a prayer". Does having "a prayer" in the title change your experience of the poem? Are all poems also prayers? Are all prayers also poems?
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