A Review of Wolf Lamb Bomb

In her 1989 essay, “Entering the Tents,” the poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker describes her experience of reading and responding to Biblical texts: “What do the stories mean to me and what to do I mean to them? I cannot tell until I write. And then each story opens to me, as I climb into it. And then each story opens like a flower, and I climb down into its throat.”

In Wolf Lamb Bomb, Aviya Kushner’s debut poetry collection, Kushner climbs into the throat of the biblical prophet Isaiah and finds there, in conversation with and commentary on his ancient verses, poems for today. Like Isaiah himself, Kushner’s book is at once angry, elegiac, and consoling. Through it she weaves an argument that in poetry, as in our world of grief and jubilation, the great language of Biblical history is more timely, and more urgent, than we might casually assume. 

For Kushner, Isaiah is not just a historical figure, a remnant of the distant past and its distant worldviews. He is Kushner’s “favorite of the poets,” but he is also her muse, her interlocutor, and her demonic possessor, who ceaselessly collapses the gaps between the present and the biblical. Consider the closing stanza of the powerful poem “Talking Back to Isaiah,” a page after Kushner has addressed the prophet as “Dear guide, dear eternal rival”:

Now let me dress myself in the green leaves 
of the future. Go back
to the books now,
and let me be.

Wolf Lamb Bomb by Aviya Kushner. Orison Press (June 1, 2021). 68 pages. $16.

She needs to demand this because Isaiah will not let her be, and even as she says it she seems to know that her demand is impossible. “I have heard the throaty prophecy,” she writes earlier in the poem; “Your words have snaked across centuries, / crossed canyons and chasms, / have gone from man to girl to woman.” Isaiah’s poetic prophecy is a part of her; she holds his words within her “like swallowed diamonds smuggled / into the crevices of the body for safekeeping….” 

Because of this, Wolf Lamb Bomb is not only a “conversation” with the Book of Isaiah, which is the language Kusher’s notes use; this does not adequately describe the intensity and irreversibility of the relationship between Kushner and Isaiah which these poems present. Isaiah is the flower down whose throat Kushner crawls, and speaks from within, but in doing so she finds that he is not only a flower but also the wolf, the lamb, and the bomb of the collection’s title: Isaiah is predator, prey, and deadly weapon, constantly threatening to destabilize and to destroy, even as he is also the tenderness and vulnerability that can enable Kushner to say credibly, at the end of “The Becoming,” that:

The dead 
poets have already left us 
all they knew of earth

and flesh, and from inside
the thick white beyond,
they sing with whitened lips

and translucent throats:
Listen closely, mortal one.
To live is a form of music.

To read Kushner’s poems is to hear that singing, the singing of the dead poet Isaiah refracted through her living voice. This is a striking example of contemporary midrash, that ancient genre of rabbinic literary commentaries which reinhabit Biblical narratives and illuminate the timelessness of their concerns.

Those concerns, for Isaiah and for Kushner, have to do with divine and human power, and with the violence that results from human arrogance. The settings in Wolf Lamb Bomb range from modern Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in a time bombings, to New York City on September 11th, to a season of catastrophic flooding in the American midwest, to the ruins of “Romans, Hittites, Assyrians, / powers mighty and powers long gone,” evoked in “No One Knows What Happened to the Hittites.” But Kushner’s poetry suggests these settings are not distinct from each other, that they are in fact the same continuous processes, from which we are never insulated. As she writes in the poem “Shards,” “Babylon is doomed to fall again--//We all are. All doomed, all poised / to fall.

“Do not tell me you have seen this all before,” she begs in “Talking Back to Isaiah,” “that Assyria never dies, just returns in disguise, / in hot breath instead of cold breath, / in a new language of old violence.” The reader knows that, just as the Bible only prohibits those things that the Israelites are doing and will continue to do, Kushner’s imploring here is futile. Isaiah has seen all this before, and today’s destructions, our upheavals and exhiles and fallen towers, are reincarnations of history’s.

But Kushner’s is not as bleak or fatalistic a vision as this might suggest. For her, as for the Biblical prophets, violence and despair contain within themselves the possibilites of hope and redemption. Her poem “Smoke,” which joins Isaiah’s description of the ancient destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel with the aftermath of September 11th, expresses this explicitly:

God will empty the land of you--
the sword will rule your fields,

…………………………...

oh you will cry, and you’ll say, this is the end,
there is no more, but no,
this is the beginning of comfort.

And I remember the days after the disaster:
how quiet it was on the highways,
how drivers let others pass,

…………………………...

and how everything seemed more
beautiful, I suppose,
and temporary, after the sword, after the worst.

The transience and vulnerability of human phenomena, the possibility any moment might end in a cascade of terror and grief, and that some moments do end this way, reveals a consoling beauty.

A vision of the transient world’s astonishing beauty is not cheap. Its price is an unflinching engagement with brutality and degradation, which Kushner witnessed firsthand as a journalist in Jerusalem, and inherited from the traumas of twentieth-century Jewish history. But even these traumas and brutalities offer us paths redemptive beauty. The penultimate poem in Wolf Lamb Bomb, “Rereading Chapter Eleven,” for example, describes 

the brother of the builder of my parents’
house, who had his tongue cut out
of his mouth at Auschwitz, which sent

him into a life without sound,
a sentence of being misunderstood.

This mutilated man becomes, hauntingly, a stand-in for the poet, as Kushner writes:

I want the tongue, that’s all I want,
to have one body part that is mine alone,

to say, God, take it all, control the land,
rule over me all my life, but don’t take
that, no, no, don’t cut my tongue out, not that.

It is a violent, arresting image for the powerlessness and vulnerability of the poet’s voice. Yet through this brutality, this threat of a stolen or mutilated tongue, come the poetry and prophecy that point towards beauty and its consolations.

Perhaps this is small comfort for the victims of violence. But the survival of Isaiah’s poetry across millennia suggests that it its poetic power and beauty offer a real and necessary, if immaterial, redemption. Kushner’s extended midrash on Isaiah suggests, in turn, that Isaiah’s potential redemptions are timeless and timely, even within a world of bombings and hijacked airplanes in place of Isaiah’s swords and chariots.

And crucially, Wolf Lamb Bomb does not restrict Isaiah’s wrathful and consoling power to Isaiah, or to Kushner, alone. As the collection’s third poem, “Rumor,” begins, “There’s a crazy man in those hills, / howling that he can comfort us all. There’s an old crazy man in all of us….” And two poems later, in “Isaiah Starts it Up,” Kushner says that “I won’t tell you what tribe I’m from or what land / I represent, because I’m all tribes, all lands, all women, all men….” This book’s vision of Isaiah and his relevance extends beyond the confines of time or place, of gender or religion. Kushner has crawled into Isaiah’s throat, and found within it a poetic, prophetic power that at once judges and consoles this world’s overwhelming violence, grief, and beauty.