A Review of unalone by Jessica Jacobs

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unalone
by Jessica Jacobs
Four Way Books, 2024.

What costs come with free will? How can language, family, and inheritance tether us to or cut us off from the past? What does it mean to feel fear? How is looking different from seeing? What does it mean to receive a secondhand promise, to be spoken for by others? How do we live with the idea that some are luckier than or favored above the rest? And what are the physics of revenge? These are just some of the urgent, penetrating questions plumbed by Jessica Jacobs’s third collection of poetry, unalone. Expansive, attentive, and brimming with generosity, the poems in this book are as assiduously researched as they are tender. Jacobs performs modern midrash, writing imaginatively into the mysteries, shadows, and unexplored corners of Genesis until they hum and shine.

This collection offers up a veritable feast for scholars and scripturally inclined readers alike: a proem (“Stepping through the Gate”) welcomes us into the book, preceding twelve sections that correspond with the twelve parshiyot (“portions”) of Genesis. Contextual epigraphs precede most poems in the book, and an extensive notes section offers even further opportunity for readers’ exploration. Jacobs is a poet-scholar in the truest sense of the word, and it’s hard to overstate the generosity of the work she’s offering up here. Of course, the beauty of contextual epigraphs is also a kind of risk: I can imagine readers less familiar with Genesis potentially feeling daunted by the offering before them, or as if there’s a barrier of entry to certain poems. However, Jacobs has clearly crafted this book to welcome any curious, attentive reader with open arms: unalone provides a buffet that can be sampled and savored depending on one’s hunger for illumination and exploration.

For me, unalone is at the height of its powers when it traffics in suggestion, doubt, and mystery. Often, this happens when Jacobs peers into and reimagines the shadowy corners of biblical stories, making them new through the use of persona, visceral imagery, and arresting statements. Jacobs approaches some of the thorniest, most troubling moments from Genesis with a particularly deft hand, refusing to shy away from their darkness or the difficult questions they incite. “Why There is No Hebrew Word for Obey” unfolds a haunting interrogation of the Akedah—the Binding of Isaac—through questions and storytelling that explore the potential aftershocks of such a near-sacrifice, as well as the perils of faith and obedience. Jacobs viscerally illustrates the horror of Abraham knowing that he’d been ready to sacrifice his own small son:

Moments like this display the great power of narrative poetry; Jacobs, with her use of imagery and enjambed couplets, slows us down, invites us into the terrible knowledge and memory of this near sacrifice. Perhaps, the poem powerfully implies, Isaac did not survive the Akedah after all—at least, not entirely. Jacobs’s unfolding of enjambed details also serves to wind us masterfully back in time: Isaac still feels the ache of memory in his shoulder; Sarah smells it, sees it on Abraham’s hands and throat; Abraham, meanwhile, is haunted by the image of his young son carrying the kindling meant for his own sacrifice. Jacobs’s imagery manages to illustrate the terrible ways in which this near-sacrifice has bound Abraham’s, Isaac’s, and Sarah’s bodies in relation to one another—especially the horror of Isaac being a child when the binding occurred. Any reader who hasn’t before grappled with this idea—and even the reader who has—is likely, like Jacobs’s Abraham, to be haunted by this imagery.

Likewise, these lines show all the ways in which the Akedah has severed the cords of intimacy in this family: ending the second couplet with “never again held” points us to an even deeper, more devastating and physical estrangement than Isaac’s refusal to make eye contact with his father. And as if this re-imagining weren’t bold or penetrating enough, Jacobs follows it up in the poem’s next section with: “who’s to say / the voice in [Abraham’s] head / was God?” Throughout its five sections, the poem continues to search and grapple until it arrives at one of the book’s most striking poem-ending revelations: “Obey, obey, obey, is everywhere / in translation. The real word is...shema: listen.” This is just one of many such suggestive, powerful, and open-ended statements in unalone.

Jacobs’s deep knowledge, compassion, and expansive imagination frequently deliver striking statements and questions that invite deep, prolonged reflection. A few examples include: “But what is wrestling/ if not an embrace?” (“Godwrestling”); “We become / what is burned into us: what / we open ourselves to” (“Prayers from a Dark Room”); “Does it matter if it’s true / or not—a child’s phantasm or really / happened?” (“Another Calling”); “…if we are not at fault for our tragedies, / can we own our triumphs? Own / anything?” (“Measure for Measure”); “The more chosen you are, the less free you are / to choose” (“Like Water on Its Course”). My favorites of these tend toward ambivalence or the capacity to hold multiple meanings at once, inviting even more questions as they’re spoken: what does it mean, really, to embrace a person, text, idea, or tradition? Is proximity always equal to intimacy, or is struggling? Is the world imagined as real, in some ways, as the world we call “real”? While readers are sure to find some of the book’s statements to be more resonant or persuasive than others, these moments of grappling, of doubt, invited me in the most deeply.

Just as vital as the poems’ intellectual searching, though, is Jacobs’s ability to inhabit the voices and personas of various characters. In just the first section of unalone, speakers include God, Methusalah, and the ground. In “And the Ground Opens Its Mouth to Speak,” Jacobs somehow manages to voice even the earth with empathy and vulnerability, speaking with exhaustion and barely-contained rage before ending with the remarkable admission: “I am so tired of being afraid / for you.” In the book’s fifth section, Jacobs deftly embodies Sarah (describing Abraham as “A great man but rarely a good one”) and then Abraham (“From the Cave, Her Voice”; “And Abraham came to eulogize Sarah and to weep for her”). As Abraham eulogizing Sarah (“God, she was so beautiful as to be / dangerous, a beacon for all who’d take / my place, who’d take her from me”) as a kind of gorgeous, fatal lighthouse, Jacobs achieves a frankness and vulnerability only matched by the poet-speaker’s later loving admission of her wife: “The truth is, in the beginning, her face / was too much for me.”

unalone is full of such care, such tenderness: in its unadorned but piercing language; in its keen, attentive imagery of the body, in its search for the stories and meaning and knowledge that might provide us, finally, with “a shield / against the unfathomable dark.”