Homecoming and other poems
Homecoming is one poet's encounter with the G-d of her ancestors, with herself, and her teachers. She wanders through time and space, from 1930s Eastern Europe to 2019 Jerusalem, the foot of BCE Mt. Sinai, to 2016 Paris. The journey through these poems is non-linear, ever moving toward the future while reaching into the past. In these lines, the self becomes a permeable membrane for experience, a vessel for the voices of the ancestors to inhabit. At all stages of the journey there are teachers, both in traditional and nontraditional form. There is a poet in a concentration camp who keeps her lover's hair in a hidden hairbrush, risking her life for a reminder of her humanity. In another poem, the Jewish people wait for Moses at the foot of Mt. Sinai, and their reasoning for constructing the golden calf is explained in relatable terms. Through and through, the poems of Homecoming are deeply human, containing human foibles, flaws, longings, and that all encompassing languish of a young heart becoming.
This work explores the multivariate and multidimensional worlds of the Jewish people. It does this while challenging the traditional and mundane, the antiquated and oppressive. It collapses the binary of religious and secular, asking the reader to engage in the work of encountering the beautiful human spirit within the day to day. Both in form and content, these poems traverse the challenging terrain of antiquity, while maintaining a firm grasp on the intense, vivid present. Queerness and feminism form the lens through which the poet views her faith, and seeks to revitalize it. It is the imperfect attempt to reconcile a tradition of patriarchy with a desire to connect with the feminine aspects of G-d. To the poet, G-d is in the work of the collective forming a new language for the Divine. Homecoming seeks the inclusion of perspectives that challenge the authority of ancient texts, and that humble themselves to the expansive and resilient traditions that have lasted through centuries of unimaginable suffering. These poems attempt to feel the suffering of a people, all while offering the paradox of love, joy, peace, and freedom. It reiterates a mother tongue composed of messages of acceptance, non-judgement, and nurturing. Nature becomes the focal point in poems about G-d, and G-d the absent focal point in poems that question the very reliability of faith itself.
The poems in this debut collection explore the depth of feeling of a poet in transition between continents, identities, and belief systems. Through real and imagined travels over the course of 5-years the work of these poems is to represent the coming of age, coming out, and coming home of a young poet. Finally, Homecoming is a question: who am I to my faith, and what is my faith to me? It is an answer: whoever you are your faith is your home. Whatever your path, whoever you are, Homecoming may just contain a part of yourself you've been hoping to meet.
From Joy D'Andrea, Brennan Integrative Therapist, Healer:
"Homecoming... what a fitting title for one woman's quest in coming home to all aspects of herself. This collection of poems is an exquisite and inspirational collection of poems representative of the journey into the deepest parts oneself. Homecoming is filled with the passion, struggle and longing one encounters in their search for self-realization: physically, spiritually and relationally. There is a "realness" to Rebecca's voice that is universal and at the same time uniquely and intimately hers. Whether one is seeking solidarity for the human condition or inspiration in their growth and healing Homecoming is to be highly recommended."
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As I read in the beginning of this collection of poems, "Dedicated to self-discovery. May we all experience its magic," I felt swept up, powerless to stop and compelled to keep reading - and reading and reading, one word blending into the next. One line into the next, one stanza into the next, one page of such jolting expressions into the next. This is a book that can be read in one sitting - and again, and again and again. Which is what I did. Returning to one poem or another.
Rebecca took me on her voyage from creation to redemption, traversing along one path that led to the next. Early on I sensed that I needed to ensure that my emotional seat belt was securely fastened. Poet and reader together travel to mysterious places, with determination, curiosity and open to discovery of the unknown.
Phrases as "home was the treacherous bridge," "we know God wants this so bad," "our dignity full of a DNA," "the days stretch out like wool on the loom," "I'm not used to feeling this good," "If faith were a garden...," "if prayer collapses the distance," and "I found my answer in spirit," are but a few of the sentiments that swept up my attention up like a strong vacuum.
Some of us tell our narratives through prose and others share our stories through poetry. Both can capture our minds and hearts as each writer or poet invites the reader into their internal landscape. Rebecca, as a poet, invited me as the reader into her deeper self and I, as a prose writer, accepted her invitation and with gratitude I am thrilled that I did.
This is a must read for those who dare, who trust, whose own curiosity compels them, to travel with Rebecca on her moving journey to self-discovery.
Yiscah Smith, Spiritual activist and mentor, educator at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and Applied Jewish Spirituality.
Rebecca Herz's luminescent poems are full of the percussive litanies of the heart at-sometimes-war-&-sometimes-synchrony with the mind, as well as an index of where we might still encounter the holy. Herz - "on the precipice of blasphemy" - beds down with doubt, sings with all the selves, vividly articulates joy, transits the physical to reach the metaphysical, and traces the thin membrane between the mundane and the sacred. The poems are powerfully formally inventive and musical, always working to re-organize and reinvent the landscape of our desires and destitutions. Homecoming and Other Poems is replete with feminine/feminist/queer chutzpah & intuition & sensuality, wherein "love [is knocking] on hidden doors," and lovers become an "infinite knot," the mouth a "blossomed rose." Again and again, the body is revised and transmuted into soul by togetherness, "the sunrise [catching] us kissing in our minds," the power & prayer of pollinating at one's fingertips. Herz braves the labyrinthine past to explore its powerful pull on the psyche and battles with the dark derelictions of patriarchy to get to "the heart of the matter" - the lush liquid rapture of now, the infinite "home inside us."
- dawn lonsinger, Muhlenberg College Professor of Creative Writing & author of Whelm
