By: Joy Ladin

Each poem in Shekhinah Speaks swirls and surges with differing velocities, alternately ferocious and tender flowing as a timeless continuous present. In Ladin’s work, the Shekhinah has much to say about our current conditions and challenges. The poetry is earthly, ethereal, and full of soul. Very few writers in any form defeat the distinction between subject and predicate so thoroughly as Joy Ladin. This is an enormously significant contribution to poetry, and theology, an extension of Ladin’s breathtaking volume Psalms. These new poems speak in the fundamental and necessary language of true universal love with the passion of a prophet.

— Gregg Bordowitz

For Joy Ladin’s Shekhinah Speaks, the boundary is the momentary rupture toward otherwise possibility. Constraining herself to the poetry of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible and the magazine Cosmopolitan, the movement between is occasion: for breath and line and flesh and pause. Visible signs as cloud and atmosphere, Shekhinah in the church of my youth was discussed in terms of glory, and that glory—Shekhinah’s glory—evinced itself through our sense capacities. A wetness as density, a change in pressure in air, pillars of night fire, day cloud cover. Ladin lets readers become aware of their flesh through poetic form, allows readers to be aware of the ways our senses conspire to tell us something about our place in the world, in worlds. Shekhinah speaks through Ladin, compelling readers to think about what it means to share space on earth and water and dirt with one another, with an other. Shekhinah speaks of holding and Ladin wants readers to be held, to know embrace and care.

— Ashon Crawley