Poetry

From the twilight of the sixth day of creation to the hellscape that was the Kovno Ghetto, Miriam Flock’s debut poetry collection navigates sacred text and lived experience with equal intimacy. These poems ask what it means to carry ancient stories in a mortal body—to bake challah knowing it is both bread and offering, to wrestle with God in the dark and recognize His image in a brother’s face.

Flock draws on Torah, Midrash, Aggadah, and a lifetime of faithful doubt to illuminate the binding and breaking that run through every life: the covenant between parent and child, the bargain struck in marriage, the terrible rulings a rabbi must make when law meets atrocity. Whether she is reading Leah’s sons’ names as a rebuke to Jacob, meditating on a phone call from someone who cannot go on, or describing the precise pleasure of plugging a crevice against a column of ants, Flock finds in the particular the irreducible human question.

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As the Word Broke Open is a book of reckoning—with God, with inheritance, with the body returning to clay—written in a voice at once scholarly and deeply personal, certain of its tradition and honest about its limits.