News at Eleven: [Rachel] Zucker is right there with us.

"Wane, wax, wobble/My mind is a map of hunger," she writes. "They say Abulafia could stop his heart/with one letter. Alef/lodged in his semi-lunar valve./Small e after breath/is what I do to keep living." Indeed, there is a wonderfully rendered aridity in Zucker's work, as if she is in a desert, and thirsty:

They say God's voice in the city
sounds like a man but in the desert
sounds like a woman. His voice, the spine
of nighttime, sounds like water . . .
. . . One word against my sternum and
I unzip.

from The Jewish Daily Forward: Poets of the Desert and the Sea

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