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jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Jewish Poetry Project of Ben Yehuda Press
@jpoetryproject.bsky.social
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jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Celebrate Jewish Book Month with our buy more, save more Jewish Book Month sale.
Save 20% on 1 book, 30% on 2-3, and 40% on 4 or more. Free shipping on orders over $25. Remember: Hanukkah is coming!

Ben Yehuda Press Jewish Book Month sale: Save 20% on 1 book, 30% on 2-3, and 40% on 4 or more. Free shipping on orders over $25.
November 28, 2025 at 7:42 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Join us Sunday at 3 pm Eastern for an online poetry reading and conversation featuring Atar Hadari, Matthew Lippman, & Maxim D. Shrayer, featuring new volumes focusing on the post-10/7 Diaspora experience and the life of Ariel Sharon

October 30, 2025 at 4:25 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Our Simchat Torah sale is underway. Save 25% on all our parsha titles: prose, poetry, and pictures; the serious, the silly, and the interactive. www.benyehudapress.c...
Save 25% during our Simchat Torah sale. Serious, silly, and interactive Torah companions. Save on parsha poetry, prose, and pictures.
October 10, 2025 at 5:36 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Two new timely books of poetry. "King of the Jews" by Matthew Lippman captures the experience of mourning for 10/7 and fearing for the fate of the hostages from abroad.
New Poetry Titles Out This Month “How does one respond to the terror of Oct 7? For Matthew Lippman, it’s through poetry. In King of the Jews, Lippman names many who perished, were kidnapped, held hostage. He names friends, students, rock stars, too. Lippman honors—and loves—them all. He even anoints them king, King of the Jews. These poems hold the beauty and the horror of the world and the deep longing, living within Lippman’s naked, aching heart.” — Diane Gottlieb “Atar Hadari’s extraordinary book Arik & Co. reads like a masterly biography magically transformed into vital poetry. Was Ariel Sharon a hero? Was he a monster? The force of a strong and twisting narrative spine, fleshed out in earthy interior monologs and dialogues, brings both the man and the era to inescapable life.” — Alicia Ostriker
September 16, 2025 at 5:00 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
A New Year is dawning, may it be for the good, and with it lengthy synagogue stays. Now is the time to pick up shul reading, so we're running a sale: Save 20% on one book, 30% on two or three, and 40% on four or more.
Ben Yehuda Press Back-To-Shul sale with savings of up to 40%
September 11, 2025 at 8:57 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Continuing our series of bilingual poetry translations, "Wu Wei Eats an Egg" presents Dutch poet Lucas Hirsch in English carefully rendered by Donna Spruijt-Metz.

*Wu wei eats an egg*

What always was, is, and will be
cracks an egg
on the edge
of a frying pan

Acts according to the nature
Cover of Wu Wei Eats an Egg “Alternatingly enraged at and bemused by the 21st century, with its traps of bourgeois excess, addiction, and ‘hollow language,’ Hirsch regularly explores the interior self, familial history, and the physical world.” —Wayne Miller, author of The End of Childhood Wu wei eats an egg What always was, is, and will be cracks an egg on the edge of a frying pan Acts according to the nature of the beast It makes breakfast, the cosmos and planets the tumbling sun It laughs at all there is It eats an egg under the heavens It fills its belly It sits back in a chair on the veranda of a house in a country under the clouds looking at creation floating by
September 2, 2025 at 2:00 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Just published: "Zion Square," the new poetry collection from Maxim D. Shrayer. Available direct from Ben Yehuda Press and the usual places.

*Zion Square*

In the earthly city of Jerusalem I like to stay
just a couple of blocks from Kikar HaMusica
in Yo’el Moshe Salomon Street, a pathway
Cover of "Zion Square" by Maxim D. Shrayer Orchestras played outside my hotel at night and I listened to the music Jews couldn’t leave in Europe. I felt sheltered by the might of the Iron Dome but also the roof of particolored umbrellas that hang over the street—once the prey of tourist photos and travel agents’ brochures, now the sky of our small warring country. I looked up and cried for all my cousins-in-arms but also for myself. Mostly tears of joy and comfort. Music didn’t end suddenly, it flowed up toward Jaffa Street and I felt someone or something carry me, a Jewish feather, to Kikar Tsiyon. The memories Maxim Shrayer carries burn in carefully crafted verses as if to contain his furies and his love. Poems born since October 7, poems of Israel and the old Soviet Union, an imagination that can bring Nabokov to size up Putin, but can also relish the sweetness of concord grapes in Massachusetts. These are poems to savor and to learn. —Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022
August 28, 2025 at 6:36 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Just published: "The Broken Heart is the Master Key," the new poetry collection from Baruch November (@bnovember). Introduction by Alicia Ostriker. Available direct from Ben Yehuda Press and the usual places.
“God works through the fires in the collec­tion, inviting us to reflect on our own spir­i­tu­al journeys… these poems … are coura­geous and vulner­a­ble, unlock­ing painful and uplift­ing truths.” —Jewish Book Council The broken heart is the master key, said the Baal Shem Tov. Despair is the loudest language in all worlds.   Ask the mother of the stolen seven-year-old girl. Ask the widowed wives still in love. Ask the newly dead as they look down. Ask the soldier missing both arms. The broken heart is the master key, said the Chassidic master to the shofar blower who lost his page of mystical notations & thought he had failed his task—   having blasted notes like a simple, broken man. I have been an inept architect. I built for one who does not live with the truth of others. I built for starlight, not shelter. —Baruch November
August 26, 2025 at 6:53 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
We are proud to be launching three new poetry titles this month:

Wu Wei Eats an Egg by Lucas Hirsch, translated from the Dutch by @dsmpoet.bsky.social

The Broken Heart is the Master Key by Baruch November

Zion Square, by Maxim D. Shrayer
3 New Poetry Titles Out This Month! Zion Square by Maxim D. Shrayer: “Maxim D. Shrayer’s voice speaks across generations. With a stubborn belief that poetry must be healing, Shrayer writes poems that break through boundaries and fears, accept defeat, and yearn for pleasure.” —David Biespiel, author of A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love Wu Wei Eats an Egg by Lucas Hirsch: “Alternatingly enraged at and bemused by the 21st century, with its traps of bourgeois excess, addiction, and ‘hollow language,’ Hirsch regularly explores the interior self, familial history, and the physical world.” —Wayne Miller, author of The End of Childhood The Broken Heart is the Master Key by Baruch November: “God works through the fires in the collec­tion, inviting us to reflect on our own spir­i­tu­al journeys… these poems … are coura­geous and vulnera­ble, unlock­ing painful and uplift­ing truths.” —Jewish Book Council
August 12, 2025 at 2:14 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
“These poems of Vanessa De Loya Stauber open doors and expand avenues. A true journey to the land of love and joy.”
— David Brandstein

www.benyehudapress.c...

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“Orchard in bloom Verdant patio Uncontested paradise Serene Punctuated by four joys Jerusalem I love you already”
July 1, 2025 at 3:00 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Vanessa De Loya Stauber's POÉSIE ORGANIQUE / ORGANIC POETRY is one of our latest poetry releases. You can order it now!

www.benyehudapress.c...
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Vanessa de Loya Stauber writes about the gift she found later in life: A passionate, tender, and loving union that binds hesr to her husband — and to Jerusalem. These erotic poems are imbued with a sense of gratitude and commitment, to the promises they made to each other, and to the promise that comes with choosing to live in a holy land. They exude the bountiful fragrances and colors of the place they now call home: Israel — azure like the sky and white as the jasmine flower. A song to the love of her life, “Organic Poetry” is a testament to sacred sensuousness, to discovering happiness and holding on to it like to dear life. In the words of the poet herself: “My poetry slips between the splinters of life and its untimely joys.”
July 1, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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*Not Akhmatova* is out now. You can buy it at the links.

(pictured Berlatsky's dog Goose, at home with poetry.)

Amazon: www.amazon.com/Not-A...

BYP: www.benyehudapress.c...
photo of a white pit-bull sitting down; she has Black eye patches and is looking skeptically at the camera. A copy of Noah Berlatsky's book "Not Akhmatova" leans against her side. The cover photo of the book is a Moscow street scene 2011.
June 30, 2025 at 2:15 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
The short poem "In Dreams," for example, could be about Akhmatova's internal exile in Russia, about Jewish exile from Russia, about the distance between Akhmatova and Berlatsky, or about all of those.
*In Dreams* We’re separated forever, you and I. But don’t cry. Instead, come to me at night in sleep. We’ll be two mountains, peak to peak yearning, never getting nearer. I see you clearer in this atmosphere of dream, above the clouds. Dawn is a cold, didactic shroud.
June 30, 2025 at 2:13 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Berlatsky's quasi translations/revisions/rethinkings (by a poet who doesn't know Russian) draw parallels and contrasts between histories of oppression in Russia. They also think about how identity is constructed by nation and exile. (text from the introduction.)
The experiences of oppression and national identity Akhmatova faced variously parallel and contrast with those of my relatives, so she’s a poet who feels like she belongs to me and like she doesn’t, an ambivalence characteristic of diaspora. Some of the poems here border on translation, though words and meanings are changed fairly freely at the best of times. Other pieces scramble further afield; some are based on her words or ideas, others respond to or argue with her, some are about her. You can go down a rabbit hole to separate out who is who, or let it remain somewhat mysterious; those are both valid approaches to diaspora and identity. This is not a work of scholarship; even if I wanted to attempt such, I’m a monoglot who’s had to lean on Google and hints from other translators.
June 30, 2025 at 2:13 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Akhmatova famously refused to leave Russia despite her suffering, because "To me the exile is forever pitiful."

As Berlatsky writes at the Cincinnatti Review, that puts Jewish exiles in an uncomfortable position. www.cincinnatireview...
Jewish people in the diaspora are, supposedly, “rootless cosmopolitans,” without a place or a culture of their own. Being chased from place to place, from Russia to America, is, from this perspective, a moral and spiritual failing. When Whitman and Dickens were writing, my ancestors were looking around their shtetl and wishing they were somewhere else. When Akhmatova was writing, my ancestors were doing their best to leave her to her own particular Russian misery. So, who’s my tradition? Whose words do I get to build on and take for mine?
June 30, 2025 at 2:13 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Anna Akmatova (1889-1996) is an icon of Russian poetry, celebrated for her delicate, sensitive lyrics and the Stalinist persecution she and her family endured. Her son was imprisoned for 20 years as a political prisoner.

Image: Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, 1922
Painting of Akhmatova, wearing a shirt open at the throat and with cropped hair, against a blue background. She looks at the viewer with a calm and open stare.
June 30, 2025 at 2:13 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Noah Berlatsky's 1st collection of poetry, *Not Akhmatova* is a collection of quasi translations, appropriations, and arguments with the poetry of Anna Akhmatova in the context of Jewish diaspora.

Order here: www.amazon.com/Not-A...
Lot’s Wife (as translated by Noah Berlatsky) The righteous man followed God’s messenger, huge and terrible, like a black mountain. His great back to Lot’s wife was sorrow and fear. She longed to stop and see just once again the white spires of her home, the place in the square where she sang to her children. The windows of the house where in joy and pain she gave birth to her children. And so she turned back, for one last sight. Her eyes like those windows were empty. Her body was a pillar of salt, bleached white. Her feet were rooted in place, like a memory. We aren’t supposed to mourn her. She’s a fool, and so many others burned. They say do not look towards her who defied God, and turned.
June 30, 2025 at 2:11 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
You and your young readers can learn more about Priesand in HEROES WITH CHUTZPAH by Deborah Bodin Cohen and Kerry Olitzky, available at the links below.

BYP: www.benyehudapress.c...
Amazon: www.amazon.com/Heroe...
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Cover of HEROES WITH CHUTZPAH: 101 TRUE TALE OF JEWISH TRAILBLAZERS, CHANGEMAKERS & REBELS By Kerry Olitzky and Deborah Bodin Cohen The cover shows the title HEROES WITH CHUTZPAH in curvy fancy letters, radiating lines of yellow light against a blue-green background. Lines of photo headshots of Jewish heroes are in the background, mostly too faint to identify.
June 27, 2025 at 2:02 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Priesand's ordination and career were difficult. She faced sexism in seminary, and had difficulty in finding a congregation. She finally served for 25 years as rabbi of Monmouth Reform Temple in Tinton Falls, New Jersey.
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Sally grew up in a Cleveland household that was more culturally than religiously Jewish. Sally decided at age 16 to become a rabbi. There was one challenge: no seminaries admitted girls into their programs. Luckily, Sally was accepted to Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1968—just as the school decided to admit female rabbinic students. “I had no desire to be a pioneer. I just wanted to be a rabbi. And I certainly didn’t start out to attract a lot of attention, although that inevitably happened,” says Sally. Some professors and classmates thought her interest was a passing fancy. Others assumed she was there to find a husband. The seminary’s dean worried aloud about Sally balancing the rabbinate with motherhood. Finding a congregation willing to consider hiring a woman was challenging. She was the last one in her class to find a position.
June 27, 2025 at 2:02 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Sally Priesand, the first ordained American woman rabbi, was born on this day in 1946. She's one of our HEROES WITH CHUTZPAH!

www.benyehudapress.c...
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digital illustration showing a tween girl from the back with long hair looking at a portrait of Priesand on a wall in a gold frame; Priesand is a young woman in glasses; a torah scroll is beside her
June 27, 2025 at 2:02 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Both books are available soon as audiobooks on hoopla and other platforms. Thanks again to JBI for recording and mastering these books!
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JBI banner "Enabling access to Jewish life through audio, braille, and large print texts"
June 24, 2025 at 3:03 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Rodger Kamenetz THE MISSING JEW is a collection of work from a leading Jewish poet—praised by Louise Erdrich, Yehuda Amichai, and Jerome Rothenberg, among many others.

www.benyehudapress.c...
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When God Hears Arguments When God hears arguments about his book he is happy like any successful author he knows all controversy will bring him more readers, he doesn’t mind. The beards of the rabbis flap over the scrolls. Black beards, white beards, beards streaked and striped, flapping. In the darkening skies, they lift the scrolls safe from history, and zigzagging they freely interpret the past. From below it appears they are flying this way, then that, but actually they are tracing a straight line through God’s curved wrath. And those who live free of interpretation, who think they are walking on positive paths, are paving over the Garden of Eden with every step.
June 24, 2025 at 3:03 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
A bit more info about the books: Maya Bernstein's NO PLACE WITHOUT YOU is her debut collection.

"...a speaker attempts to balance—impossibly, ecstatically—her roles as mother, wife, cancer survivor, and observant Jew."
—Jehanne Dubrow

www.benyehudapress.c...
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Elul Ghazal The new moon rises. I look beyond the windowsill, return my gaze to God. Somewhere, a Shofar wails its cry, a shrill “Return!” God, if You are King, I want to be Your Queen. I’d write You love notes with my feathered quill, Return… Come to my bed. If You’re a shepherd, I want to be a sheep leaping through the grassy hills, returning. I’m Seeking You, Your staff and flask and flute and sandaled feet. I hide in my chamber. You made a promise I expect You to fulfill: to return. The sun glares through the window. I pull the curtains closed. I stray in my heart. I lie still, return. I graze in the pastures of my dreams, I laze in my verdant bed, but You’ve slipped from the linen sheets before I’ve had my fill, my turn. I seek but cannot find You. I place a sachet of myrrh between my breasts, hoping it will spill, return Your hungry gaze toward me, so I will not stray after the flocks of Your companions. I’ll despair till You return. Then would the trees put forth their fruit? Would turtle- doves begin to coo? Would You hear my voice and thrill at my return? If only You would whisper, Maya, come to me! Your love is better than wine! Then I will return.
June 24, 2025 at 3:03 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
They should be available on all audiobook platforms soon; THE MISSING JEW is already available on Hoopla, which you may be able to access with a library card.

www.hoopladigital.co...
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cover of THE MISSING JEW: POEMS 1976-2022 cover image is abstract blue watercolor trees; there is illegible writing across the top of them
June 24, 2025 at 3:02 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
The JBI (former Jewish Braille Institute) has sponsored audio recordings of two Jewish Poetry Project titles: Rodger Kamenetz's THE MISSING JEW and Maya Bernstein's NO PLACE WITHOUT YOU.

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cover of NO PLACE WITHOUT YOU cover image is photo of a very old, closed blue arched door; looks like it dates from ancient times
June 24, 2025 at 3:02 PM