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ISBN: PB: 9781784107390

Carcanet

May 2019

80 pp.

21.6x13.5 cm

PB:
£9,99
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Nineveh

Zohar Atkins's first collection "Nineveh" takes its modernist bearings from Edmond Jabes, Paul Celan, and Yehudah Amichai; but also, merrily, from John Ashbery and Frank O'hara. His poems offer humor and hospitality alongside deep learning and enigmatic, mystical theophany. The division between secular and religious is blurred, the two coexist in a generous exchange. The Bible is near at hand but rendered unfamiliar in the combination of anachronism with classical allusion. The poems produce a jarring, contemporary Midrashim – interpretative retellings of canonical tales. Cain and Abel appear as business executives, Ishmael is a Palestinian dying in an Israeli hospital, Rachel and Leah are the projected identities of a demented Jacob, and God is a perfectionist who procrastinates by binge watching TV. These poems are for intellectuals disenchanted with intellectualism and for seekers and sensualists in search of a renewing approach to language. Scholar and rabbi, Atkins has learned that poetry and not erudition offers a securer saving power. 'The thinker says what being is; the poet names what is holy' (Heidegger).

About the Author

Zohar Atkins, born in 1988, grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. He holds an A.B. in Classics and Jewish Studies and an A.M. in History from Brown University, and a DPhil in Theology from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. A rabbinic student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he is a Wexner Graduate Fellow and a Fellow at the David Hartman Center.