A Speaker is a Wilderness: Poems on the Sacred Path from Broken to Whole - Softcover

Goodman Herrick, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1958972371 ISBN 13: 9781958972373

Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing, 2024

Synopsis

Weaves Jewish sacred texts, mysticism, human rights, and a modern voice of radical love, taking readers on a path of healing from brokenness to wholeness. 

This poetry addresses the interconnection of individual, communal, and global trauma, towards collective liberation. In Hebrew, the words for wilderness, speaker, and speaks are spelled the same and share the same root letters. Goodman Herrick’s title, from a poem in the collection, references the Torah’s BaMidbar (in the wilderness or desert) and her ancestor’s ritual practice of elevating etymology, roots, and folk word associations as spiritual meditation. The author returns to her roots and original wholeness through reconnecting language: “Wilderness speaks/ A speaker is a wilderness.”

Goodman Herrick survived sexual assault in her teens by a classmate, and left home at 14. The grandchild of an Auschwitz survivor, she’s been a New York City club kid, MTV writer-producer, a peacemaker around the world, nun at a Vedanta convent, and student of Chassidic rabbis. This expansiveness lives in her poems. The book invites readers to reconsider prayer and blessing as an ongoing, fluid, language, holding space for the reverent and irreverent as prophetic. 

About this title

About the Author

Anna Goodman Herrick works at the intersection of spirituality, sacred words, and human rights. She is a writer, poet, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist. Anna has performed her poetry across the U.S., including at the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Phosphorescence Poetry Reading Series, presenting “contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice.” She has performed her poetry at the El Paso border for Artist Uprising with V (formerly Eve Ensler), Bloomsday on Broadway and Radio Bloomsday, and at the Theopoetics Conference. Her recent poetry is included in Rattle, The Ekphrastic Review, Hevria Magazine, and Ritualwell. She has created work for television and branded content for Sony, ABC Family, Oprah Winfrey Network, and MTV and shared her work at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and in film, stage, museums and galleries nationwide. For more information visit: annagoodmanherrick.com and Instagram @annagoodmanherrick.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BLESSING FOR DIASPORA AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

To be alive
is to attend a prayer service.
To do the work of the heart
in the temple of the world,
to build
the tender center of that temple
inside yourself,
is a blessing:
to seek for that center again and again
in everyone (each body a tent for conducting its own ceremony into ascension),
to build the altar within you
and decide what you will sacrifice
and who you will not,
to hold all the brokenness
for the sake of any chance of repair,
to welcome everyone exiled,
everything broken
from its origins,
all holinesses ripped
from their dwelling places,
and chant together,
here, here, here.

Edition details

• Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1958972371
• ISBN 13: 9781958972373
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 94