A Speaker is a Wilderness: Poems on the Sacred Path from Broken to Whole

by Anna Goodman Herrick

Overview

Weaves Jewish sacred texts, mysticism, human rights, and a modern voice of radical love, taking readers on a path of healing from brokenness to wholeness. 

This poetry addresses the interconnection of individual, communal, and global trauma, towards collective liberation. In Hebrew, the words for wilderness, speaker, and speaks are spelled the same and share the same root letters. Goodman Herrick’s title, from a poem in the collection, references the Torah’s BaMidbar (in the wilderness or desert) and her ancestor’s ritual practice of elevating etymology, roots, and folk word associations as spiritual meditation. The author returns to her roots and original wholeness through reconnecting language: “Wilderness speaks/ A speaker is a wilderness.”

Goodman Herrick survived sexual assault in her teens by a classmate, and left home at 14. The grandchild of an Auschwitz survivor, she’s been a New York City club kid, MTV writer-producer, a peacemaker around the world, nun at a Vedanta convent, and student of Chassidic rabbis. This expansiveness lives in her poems. The book invites readers to reconsider prayer and blessing as an ongoing, fluid, language, holding space for the reverent and irreverent as prophetic. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781958972373
Publisher:	Monkfish Book Publishing Company
Publication date:	06/04/2024
Pages:	94
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Anna Goodman Herrick works at the intersection of spirituality, sacred words, and human rights. She is a writer, poet, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist. Anna has performed her poetry across the U.S., including at the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Phosphorescence Poetry Reading Series, presenting “contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice.” She has performed her poetry at the El Paso border for Artist Uprising with V (formerly Eve Ensler), Bloomsday on Broadway and Radio Bloomsday, and at the Theopoetics Conference. Her recent poetry is included in Rattle, The Ekphrastic Review, Hevria Magazine, and Ritualwell. She has created work for television and branded content for Sony, ABC Family, Oprah Winfrey Network, and MTV and shared her work at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and in film, stage, museums and galleries nationwide. For more information visit: annagoodmanherrick.com and Instagram @annagoodmanherrick.

Read an Excerpt

BLESSING FOR DIASPORA AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

To be alive
is to attend a prayer service.
To do the work of the heart
in the temple of the world,
to build
the tender center of that temple
inside yourself,
is a blessing:
to seek for that center again and again
in everyone (each body a tent for conducting its own ceremony into ascension),
to build the altar within you
and decide what you will sacrifice
and who you will not,
to hold all the brokenness
for the sake of any chance of repair,
to welcome everyone exiled,
everything broken
from its origins,
all holinesses ripped
from their dwelling places,
and chant together,
here, here, here.

Editorial Reviews

Anna Goodman Herrick revels in beauty and sacredness, a testament to defiantly vowing to not live in fear. She writes of a new beginning, informed by tragedy but refusing to be defined by it: ‘We opened / the windows of ourselves, sent the night out searching / for our collective liberation like a raven / for the end of the flood.’” —Kara Lewis, Write Poetry

“Listening to Anna Goodman Herrick read a poem made the hair on my arm stand up. I wonder if we could measure the effects of good poetry on electrodermal activity.” —Timothy Green, Editor, Rattle Magazine

“Anna Goodman Herrick is a rising star, a poet, and a bard well beyond her years in wisdom and vision. Her book A Speaker Is a Wilderness brings tears of recognition and awe to my eyes every time I open it.” —Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone, author of Wounds into Wisdom

From the Publisher