Book of Failed Salvation: Poems

By Julia Knobloch

In BOOK OF FAILED SALVATION, her second collection, poet and rabbi-in-training Julia Knobloch chronicles a relationship that spanned continents before coming to an end. In these poems, complicated Jewish histories intertwine with a yearning for consolation, while prophets dance and cypresses tower into the sky. Knobloch's exploration of loneliness resonates with our own losses, and her questions about creating our salvation are rays of light illuminating life from unexpected angles.

"In these intensely felt and exquisitely wrought poems, the focus on love, loss of love and the personal journey opens profound perceptions through language steeped in both the sacred and profane. While concretely personal, the poems insist on their location in nature, history, and tradition. 'What's unplanned can seem prophetic, ' the poet writes in musical lines that reflect the movement made by an exploratory mind as it examines its own feelings and insights, and in the process creates poems that surprise and excite."

— Linda Stern Zisquit, author, Havoc: New and Selected Poems

"The beautiful poems in Julia Knobloch's Book of Failed Salvation express a tender longing for spiritual, physical, and emotional connection. They detail a life in movement-across distances, faith, love, and doubt. The poems vividly evoke the lived experience of a number of places, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, and Los Angeles, each landscape always changing like the restless speaker who seeks a knowledge and an experience of what the poems unapologetically call 'salvation.' "

— David Caplan, author, Into My Garden

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ben Yehuda Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781963475067

Book preview

PORT OF SALT, IN THE WEST

for Yehuda Halevi

This port was founded when the temple stood

in the east, across the sea

Phoenicians salted fish; Romans traded pottery

when the temple fell in the east, across the sea

From this port of salt you embarked

driven by your longing for the dawn

fallen kingdoms behind you, waiting for you

in the east, across the sea

Far is the green river from this port of salt

Your daughter and her son stood on the quay

They promised to tend your empty gardens

You fell into the dust at the gates of your desire

Please call me Morenica, one more time

The sun has turned my pale skin dark

Your ship sails to the east, across the sea

and all my longing goes with you, Yehuda

IN THE DESERT

Before I left for the desert I dropped you off

at the house of study

I can’t locate on the map

I remember the street

hibiscus bushes in front of the library

and how you texted me directions

together with the photo we took.

I got lost on my way out of the city

I didn’t mind

I didn’t look at the directions

I enjoyed the detour through the valley

a few extra moments in this foreign place

where the license plate made me a native.

Earlier that day, when I parked the car

to meet you for eggs and salads and coffee at the Café 7

a woman called out from the sidewalk:

There is space!

And this was promising because in Hebrew

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