Psalms

These psalms grow out of a decades-long fascination with the biblical psalms, particularly the Davidic psalms, which portray the tempestuous, sometimes awful intimacy of the Divine-human relationship. In the lightning-shot Psalm-space where Divine meets human, time shatters, splits, leaps like a river, and so does the soul of the speaker, now hunting God, now hunted, now languishing in despair, now reclining in quiet triumph against the pillars of Heavens. These contemporary psalms attempt to create a corollary to that biblical psalm space, a space narrowed to a single room in which God and the speaker have no choice but to face and struggle toward one another through the whirlwind of pain and love.

"God has a lot to answer for, and Joy Ladin doesn't let him off easy in Psalms. Intimate, exacting, agonistic, and seductive, these poems could only come from a believer who demands not easy professions, but ecstatic confirmations of faith. Ultimately Ladin sings to God songs we would all profit by hearing, songs that bear the scars as well as caresses of her encounter with the divine."
-David Bergman
author of Heroic Measures

"As with the canonical psalms, Ladin's Psalms capture an experience that is at once deeply personal and universal-intimacy with a Divine Presence that can fill us with both ecstasy and revulsion, often simultaneously. God is not merely in our pleasure and pain; God is our pleasure and pain."
-Rev. Allyson Robinson
Associate Director of Diversity, Human Rights Campaign

Joy Ladin is David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English at Stern College of Yeshiva University. Her previous books of poetry include Transmigration (2009), The Book of Anna (2006), and Alternatives to History (2003).