i have wrestled with the way clouds weep

“This is my garden among rubble,” writes Judy Nahum in this intricate and beautiful collection. And indeed, the world conjured between these pages is in a constant state of transformation. Sea shells shatter into speech, rocks crumble into mirrors, relationships begin and end, arias slides into the elegiac. Nahum’s poems expand and contract in scope, as the poet’s tender attention roams the earth and climbs into the stratosphere. The speaker and her beloveds “reckon with survival,/ the sun’s last wave of migrants.” In this time of upheaval, uncertainty, destruction and creation, Nahum’s poems remind me how to live: wrestle and weep, forage and weave, notice, write, sing and love. Her collection resists resolution, but takes us, generously, to “the cusp of something holy, reverberating.”

—Mónica Gomery, author of Might Kindred & Here is the Night and the Night on the Road