You Were Adam: Poems

By Marina Zilbergerts

Marina Zilbergerts's first poetry collection, You Were Adam, explores the triumphs and disappointments of divine and human creativity. Drawing on the Bible and Jewish thought, Zilbergerts imagines creation through the lens of relationships--metaphysical, erotic, and devotional. Ranging across spiritual and biographical space, from Zhitomir, Ukraine, to the farmlands of Wisconsin, her poems breathe the consciousness of connection into the broken and everyday experience of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Oct 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666754650

Marina Zilbergerts

Marina Zilbergerts is a scholar of Jewish literature and thought. She grew up in Zhitomir, Tel Aviv, and Toronto and received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. From 2016-2022, she was the Lipton Assistant Professor of Eastern European Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is the author of The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature (Indiana University Press). Her first book of poetry, a series of retellings of Genesis called You Were Adam, was recently published by Wipf & Stock. The book explores themes in Jewish thought and mysticism in contemporary ways, blending poetic rereadings of Genesis and Greek mythology with vignettes from everyday life.

Book preview

You Were Adam

Creation

I crafted man

in my own likeness

and taught him

what I like.

I formed a man

from chaos, darkness,

showed him my faces

in the dark.

I gathered

waters from deep oceans

so he would fill me

to the bounds

and bound

myself in endless circles,

waiting all night

for him to come.

You Were Adam

You were Adam.

I put on Eve’s skin

to get your attention.

I wanted you all to myself,

to know myself

to wrap myself around you

to swallow you whole.

You were a fledgling

in the garden of youth

free of the degeneration of age

a boy in a beautiful male body

slim sinews shining

beneath your t-shirt sleeve

playing ball in the garden.

I was all knowing and all wanting—

including your schedule, your address,

with whom you spend your time,

I touched your perfect body

with my mind, stripped away

your past experiences, one by one.

The dream taste of satisfaction,

pleasing to the palate

and good for knowledge, was near.

I knew that knowing me would kill you,

and that it would kill me to lose you,

and that knowing brings death.

I prayed to God to keep you