In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young woman's relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love and female sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to "our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies," a force somehow responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines survival, assimilation and intermarriage, subjects bound together by complex, if sometimes compromised, ties to the speaker's Judaism. Through wit and careful prosody, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards lays bare the struggles and triumphs experienced through a teenage girl's coming of age, showing the reader what it means to become - and remain - a Jewish woman in America.

Book Information
ISBN 9780896728547
Author Rachel Mennies
Format Hardback
Page Count 88
Imprint Texas Tech Press,U.S.
Publisher Texas Tech Press,U.S.