In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young woman's relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love, and female sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to "our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies," a force somehow responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines survival, assimilation, and intermarriage, subjects bound together by complex, if sometimes compromised, ties to the speaker's Judaism. Through wit and careful prosody, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards lays bare the struggles and triumphs experienced through a teenage girl's coming of age, showing the reader what it means to become--and remain--a Jewish woman in America.

Author: Rachel Mennies
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Published: 04/15/2014
Series: Walt McDonald First-Book Poetry
Pages: 96
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780896728547


Award: 2015 National Jewish Book Award Finalist - Poetry

About the Author
Rachel Mennies's poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere, and have been reprinted at Poetry Daily. Born in the Philadelphia area, she currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.