This Wednesday, December 18th at 6pm ET on Zoom:
“Rimonim” Virtual Book Launch
Jewish Currents is proud to cosponsor this virtual book talk, alongside Ayin Press, the Jewish Liberation Front, and Rise Up. Join poets Aurora Levins Morales and Mónica Gomery for an evening of poetry and conversation to celebrate Levins Morales’s new book, Rimonim!
Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of rupture and uncertainty, beloved movement poet Aurora Levins Morales brings us a prayer book for the street, for reconstituting the future through our gestures in the present. In these poems of devotion and protest, Levins Morales speaks across and through time with an undeniably prophetic voice. Written in collaboration with various communities looking to honor, unravel, and rebuild Jewish liturgies, Rimonim is a book of lyric in the most immediate sense—of poems that are meant to be read and sung. Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present, these poems will both accompany specific Jewish practices and offer inspiration for the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice.
Ultimately, these forty-nine poems honor the forty-ninth year, when it was taught that everything in the land would begin anew, everything redistributed and freed, when the people would see that everything on this earth was “ready to wake and bloom / just under the skin of what is.”
About the speakers
Aurora Levins Morales is a cuir Ashkenazi Boricua writer of poetry, essays, and fiction. A child of blacklisted communist parents, she grew up immersed in social justice movements and the poetry of liberation, and came into public voice as part of the collective eruptions of radical art of the 1970s and ’80s. She is the author of nine books, including Medicine Stories, Kindling, Remedios, and Silt. Her poetry is widely used in synagogues and churches, in schools and at rallies, painted on walls and recited at weddings, translated into seven languages and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. After forty years in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives at Finca la Lluvia, an agro-poetry project in the western mountains of Boriken, also known as Puerto Rico. The Story of What Is Broken Is Whole: An Aurora Levins Morales Reader will be published in 2024 by Duke University Press. Find her on Patreon and at www.auroralevinsmorales.com.
Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi living on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. She is the author of Might Kindred, winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poems have received the American Poetry Review Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize and the Palette Poetry Sappho Prize for Women Poets. She serves as a rabbi at Kol Tzedek Synagogue, and is, for the first time, at work on a novel.
To register: "Rimonim" Virtual Book Launch - Ayin Press