Great Regulars: There are plenty of Jewish American poets

at work today--including some of the most highly esteemed, like Adrienne Rich and Robert Pinsky--but no one, I think, is as successful as [Jacqueline] Osherow at making Jewishness a productive subject for poetry. This is not because her work is saturated with biblical references, or because she writes piously about a vanished past, or because she waxes kabbalistic and makes play with Golems and gematria--all techniques that have grown overfamiliar in American Jewish writing. Rather, Osherow allows Judaism and Jewish history into her work as problems--as things to think about, with, and sometimes against; as sources of questions and, occasionally, answers. In this way, she comes much closer than most poets to an honest expression of contemporary American Jewish sensibility.

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: Rooted

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