Dividing Rivers

Dividing Rivers is a memoir in poetry about the author's struggles as a nerdy Jewish girl growing up in Brooklyn, NY, with her parents' and community's assumptions about Jews and Whiteness, being a Jewish woman, and relationships with Black people. Excluded from Yiddish, the language of her immigrant grandparents, she searches within their socialist ideals for a language and means to "birth a new world" without antisemitism and racism. As she matures, she surveys her women friends about their "instruction" in white supremacy. And she looks at her own experiences as a woman, white, and Jew deeply connected to the six-pointed star as the symbol of Judaism, for a new "golden rule" to teach us "How not to do to others what was done to us." How not to pass the poisonous legacies of discrimination onto to the next generation and educate our children to resist and reject it. With unsettling frankness, the poems explore her fraught friendships and romances with Black people, set against a backdrop of racial injustice and social activism. We meet Colin, the son of a Guyanese immigrant to England, and his feisty mother, whom the poet regrets not having gotten to know fifty years earlier when on a study abroad trip. We meet a fiery organizer during Dartmouth College's turbulent "shanty" divestment protest of South African apartheid in the early 1980s. We see the poet struggling with her blind spots, biases, and privilege. We meet poets June Jordan and Grace Paley, who teach the author valuable lessons and the importance of "do-overs" and self-forgiveness, accepting brokenness and repair as part of our personal and collective history. Several self-portraits in the collection explore themes of "kintsugi," the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold-infused adhesive, and "pentimento," the reappearance in a painting of an original drawing or painted element, which was eventually painted over. Whitewashing and the stretch marks of birth and growth are prominent images as is the surging of oceans and tides. Writing in free verse and forms like the sonnet and pantoum, the poems explore the many rivers that divide us from each other, and the author's concerted attempts and often failures to cross them. And her enduring faith that they can and must be crossed.