Prayers of a Heretic explores the "crime" of heresy and the
condition of existential displacement through the language of
prayer and prayerful voice/s. In the first section, "Visits and
Visitations," the poet imagines a variety of protoganists in
situations of supplication. The second section, "In the Gleaning,"
examines the life, trangressions, and prayers of the title
character and the primacy of books, libraries, and reading for
refuge and reconfiguration. Eschewing a secular/religious divide,
the book offers an expansive interpretation of the enduring power
of prayer. Four poems also have a Yiddish version.
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Taub is a master of the character study. His poems are crowded
with portraits, novels in miniature, of the old, the overlooked,
the dispossessed. Here you will find Aunt Milkah Pesl, taciturn and
unsentimental, the volunteer in assisted living who reads books in
Yiddish, the patient in an MRI scanner listening to "a symphony of
terror" like "John Zorn on Quaaludes." There are the regulars in a
library, and the treasures found hidden in the pages of old books.
There are lonely men in search of "fleshly glory." And over-arching
all, there are repentance and atonement, constantly remade
anew.
--Kim Roberts, author of Pearl Poetry Prize-winning Animal
Magnetism
This book is a feast: sensuous, ironic, political, hilarious,
poignant and wise. Intimately Jewish yet embracing of all, its cast
of characters includes aged professors, flirtatious landladies,
poem-peddlers and the Pied Piper. In "Credo," a stunning poem near
the book's end, Taub powerfully defines religion on his own terms,
with equal measures of awe, horror and gratitude at the
world.
--Ruth L. Schwartz, author of Edgewater
Whether he's writing in English or Yiddish, in poetry or prayer,
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub has a firm grasp on the language of the heart.
His characters, men (including one named Yermiyahu) and women whose
only crimes are that they are human, are as familiar as our own
reflections. In Taub's skilled and attentive hands, no judgments
are passed; heresy is in the eye of the beholder.
--Gregg Shapiro, author of GREGG SHAPIRO: 77 and Protection
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