For Jessica Jacobs, “Unalone” is more than a title of her new poetry collection: it is also a one-word condensation of the driving force of her work, a sense of reassurance and connection to the voices of the ancient tradition, and to the poets that surround her. “Unalone,” published last month by Four Ways Books is a book-long project: in it, Jacobs goes through each of the Torah portions in Genesis, offering poetic responses to each. Interpretive and original, respectful and playful, scholarly and personal, this volume is both poetry and midrash at once. Jessica and I met at a sleepy coffee shop in Western Massachusetts, where she spent a few days as a part of her book tour. She described going on a life-changing retreat in a desert a number of years ago. She did not see other people for weeks, she said, and described gradually entering a state of profound self-inquiry: “All of the questions that I had suppressed, the really big questions about - why are we here, how do we live with death, how do we live a good life - there was suddenly room for them to enter to my mind. When I went back home, I tried to find the answers in poetry, went to a lot of readings, tried to find the answers in novels, and it all felt really thin.” It was then that she listened to two interviews that converged in her mind: one with James Martin, Jesuit priest and a follower of St. Ignatius of Loyola whose ideas the imaginative prayer, resonated with the poet. And she also learned about Midrash from an interview with Avivah Zornberg, a Jewish scholar. “And I thought oh, this is ancient, tested wisdom, and maybe I need to reinvestigate this, having walked away from my Judaism when I was probably 12 years old.” These reinvestigations took Jacobs to the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she met Rabbi Burton Visotzky, a world-renown authority on Midrash. Visotzky offered Jacobs to study in havruta – a one-on-one immersive style of learning sacred Jewish texts. And, over seven years of researching and learning, “Unalone” came to life as a full-fledged manuscript. ...

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