Pamela Wax
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Every Single Beast of My Heart
by Pamela Wax
ISBN: 978-1-962405-63-8
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Pamela Wax is an ordained rabbi who has worked as a congregational rabbi, a pastoral counselor, and an adult educator. Her articles and essays on topics of feminism and Jewish spirituality have been published in numerous books and periodicals. She is author of two previous poetry collections, Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022) and Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems, published in over 60 literary journals, have received three Best of the Net nominations and awards from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. Pam lives in the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Framed through the lens of the five Zen remembrances, Every Single Beast of My Heart weaves poems on aging, mortality, myth, and folklore into a meditation on impermanence. The narrator’s loss of her brother to suicide, her role as a rabbi, and her deep relationship to the natural world all influence the engaged, spiritual, and feminist world-view of Wax’s poems, in which we come to understand that worldly engagement must ultimately ground our lives.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Memorable in spiritual breadth, brave in intellectual clarity, meticulous in craft, and exhilarating in lyric solidity, the poems in Pamela Wax’s collection, Every Single Beast of My Heart, present the reader with “wisdom hard as oak and bone” and with “what glitters in this witnessing” of “each tiered layer of grief.” An ordained rabbi and a poet of remarkable range and talent, Wax’s stately poems are elegant and consoling, while clear-eyed about our human fragilities, in a voice that never recoils from bringing into focus excruciating truths. Pamela Wax’s prayer-like poetry stirs the reader to pay attention to emotions that are heartbreaking and hard-won, that relish “the inscrutable darkness,” and the “glimmer of us.”
––Yerra Sugarman, author of Aunt Bird
This is a book of hard-fought rescue. Wax’s poems salvage and save memory, mothers, siblings, drowned animals, the aging body, lost potentialities, words, a tan umbrella, G-d, “a dust bowl of dead things,” “a world on fire,” and her own soul. We, who need rescue ourselves, needEvery Single Beast of My Heart.
––David Ebenbach, author of What’s Left to Us by Evening
This powerful collection examines deep spirituality, aging, and death with nuance and depth. Wax’s devotion to the natural world, her dismay over climate change, and her role as a rabbi inform these poems as does her fierce feminism and political engagement. The beating heart of the book are the poems about the loss of her brother by suicide and serve as a constant reminder to the speaker and the reader of both the fragility and the significance of life: “tell me, would you, / about the inscrutable darkness / and the glimmer / of us that couldn’t lure you / to hold the living.” This is an unforgettable collection.
––Jennifer Franklin, author of A Fire in Her Brain
