Memos From the Broken World

Taking her title from the kabbalist creation tale of the clay vessels that had to break so God’s light could scatter through the universe, Nordhaus recalls a child who would eat nothing broken, a kewpie doll with a crack that “spidered across his plaster skull” with blackness trickling from “the hollow place inside.” She conjures a spark of light that “splashed into the teacup of a skinny Jew named Kafka,” and details the clash between religious and ethnic longings and the realities of violent conflict in a sequence of poems set in Israel and the West Bank. Ranging over time and continents, the poems in Memos from the Broken World, tell of the various strategies we humans devise, as we pursue happiness in an imperfect world.

“Time eats everything up,” writes Jean Nordhaus, and that includes our griefs as well as our joys. Her poems in Memos from the Broken World stand as antidotes to Time’s thoughtless erasures, reminding us – for what else is a memo but a reminder? – that the world is broken so that it may continue. Home and homelessness, exile and restoration, childhood and parenthood, the range of subjects among these short, perfect lyrics is breathtaking. These are poems in praise of the continuities of living.

— Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems