Animals Are Shouting Down From the Sky: poems(55 Jewish Poetry Project)

Talmud is busy telling me how to make a wine sack out of a beaver's stomach lining. Out the window the redwood's gone. It's started to rain, maybe Adderall in the drops, ocean is calmed down. "Often heart-stopping, these poems abound in images uniquely unfamiliar. Not intended for the casual reader, they capture the violation of nature, free speech silenced, humanity flattened, families - and friends - failing as they often do. Yet above all, the poems are profoundly nourishing. How can that be? In part because of the poet's delicious humor, even more so that rare thing, her purity of soul, and above all, because she tells the truth." -Merle Feld, author of Longing, Poems for a Life

About the Author :
Genevieve Greinetz is a San Francisco based poet and rabbi. Her pieces have been published in NELLE, Honey Literary, and NomadartX, among other journals. Animals Are Shouting Down From the Sky is her first full length collection.

Review :
"The poems in this collection begin in the middle of a thought. The effect that this has is one of deep urgency, like seeing a shooting star in the middle of the Northern Lights. There is that much color and surprise in these poems. Greinetz is a new poet with an old voice or a new voice with an old soul or a voice that has been here for a very long time so that when you hear her words, read them, you think: I didn't know these poems existed but I have always known they were here, with me, in my body, for as long as there has been time. Such is the force of Greinetz's poetry. They are the body and the earth. They explore Judaism, the female body, love, and the ocean. That is to say, everything that is from above and everything that is here on the planet, of the earth. This book is about us, the human animal, not paying enough attention to our humanity even when we are reminded by the creatures from the sky shouting at us to pay attention. The poet writes 'Birds are saying, Earth you've got to stop this/love and support for your bad boy human, it's killing you.' Greinetz's poetry is one of constant surprise, deep imagery and sonic explosions so we can look up and notice ourselves in the eyes of those animals and take care of one another like we are supposed to, urgently, with music." -Matthew Lippman, author of We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On "In a voice disarmingly frank, magnificently bold, always irreverent (some might say blasphemous) we're compelled to inhabit psychic and existential spaces that feel both wildly dangerous and exceedingly necessary. The poems wake us up to what is, and what is not-destroying useless categories in the project of letting us feel with tender, broken hearts, and see more clearly through human, half-blind eyes." -Anne Germanacos, author of Tribute