I want to visit what once was a god and became poetry, became shard
A Conversation with Aviya Kushner about her Newest Collection, Wolf Lamb Bomb
Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau / Penguin Random House, 2015), which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, a Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Finalist, and one of Publishers' Weekly’s Top 10 Religion Stories of the year. She is also the author of WOLF LAMB BOMB (Orison Books, 2021), a poetry collection deeply engaged with the Book of Isaiah, and the poetry chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). She is The Forward’s language columnist, and previously wrote a travel column for The International Jerusalem Post. Her work has been supported by the Howard Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. She is a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective and serves on the board of the American Literary Translators Association, as well as the Executive Committee in Nonfiction at the Modern Languages Association.
Wolf Lamb Bomb is a conversation with The Book of Isaiah and a grappling with the idea of prophecy as explanation—and poetry as a vocation.
Tiffany Troy: You begin Wolf Lamb Bomb with the epigraph that becomes Wolf Lamb Bomb’s section titles.
How does the epigraph open the world to your collection? How do the Book of Isaiah, its Hebrew translation, and the idea of proclamation and the question in it inform your collection?
Aviya Kushner: Wolf Lamb Bomb is the result of the many years I spent rereading Isaiah in Hebrew and then in English, and thinking about what a tremendous poet Isaiah was and how I wished I could speak with him. and understand his incredible power.
But most of all, I wanted him to answer back. To me, Isaiah was not just a prophet, but the greatest poet I have ever encountered. And I wanted to engage in conversation with him.
I hope that epigraph—from an iconic section in Isaiah Chapter 40—captures that sense of conversation, with one voice ringing out with the challenge of “Proclaim!” and another answering—“what shall I proclaim?” [“Another Asks: What Shall I Proclaim!”] I wanted the reader to feel that desire for dialogue and to trace with me the ways it continues throughout the book.
TT: What was the process like, channeling the fury of the prophet Isaiah and building your poems around and after the Book of Isaiah?
AK: That was one of the aspects of Isaiah that startled and constantly moved me; his ability to make anger beautiful. In our society, I often notice how some people are allowed to be angry, and others are not. Anger is often framed as something ugly and embarrassing—something to be avoided. I noticed that in this ancient, biblical context, anger was instead associated with justice. I really loved that idea.
The process started with a lot of reading! For many years, I read the Hebrew over and over again, just absorbing various aspects of Isaiah’s poetry. Then after a while I found myself going to coffee shops in the morning with the Book of Isaiah and looking at small segments of the Hebrew, and then writing a poem in response on a yellow legal pad. That’s why many of the poems in Wolf Lamb Bomb have one line of Isaiah embedded in them.
TT: I definitely feel the epic and monumental as well as the personal and lyrical. How do you channel Isaiah’s different tempers into your poetry?
AK: I really admired Isaiah’s different registers—the soft, the hard, the raging, and the soothing. There are these gorgeous descriptive moments, touching upon the wilderness, the desert, and the wind, and you can feel that sense of the lone human being in the vastness of nature.
There are also detailed and terrifying portraits of dictators and conquerors and their declarations, such as snippets of Sennacherib, the king of Assyria. When I first started working on Wolf Lamb Bomb, these terrible dictators—these authoritarian rulers of the ancient past—felt very, very far away. There was no way I could have guessed in 2002 or 2005 how relevant such threats would be in the United States. I read Isaiah differently, with time, and I read as someone who also had to think about an authoritarian ruler coming closer, about a direct and immediate threat, about a President who tried to overturn the vote and actually declared “I alone can fix it.”
Another register is exhalation and exclamation. Then there are the wonderful exclamations in Isaiah that seem so human to me, so intimate and so close. There are exhalations like “hoy” in the Hebrew, for example in Isaiah 5:8, and that “hoy” is often translated as “ah” in English. To me the ancient Hebrew “hoy” is similar to contemporary English-language poet’s “oh.” Sometimes those “hoy’s” don't always come through in translation, and so I wanted to get them in.
TT: You write: “We all are. All doomed, all poised/ to fall./ But I want the details, I want the identities/ of the little shards,/ their exact addresses and conditions,/ I want to visit what/ once was a god and became poetry, became shard.”
In Wolf Lamb Bomb, many poems are elegies to victims of Holocaust, genocide, and other hate crimes and draws from your family and personal history. How do you pay homage to the fallen and the shards?
AK: Wow, what a great question! When I was reading and rereading the Book of Isaiah, there were often moments where I really wanted more details. For example, I wanted to know more about how defeat happened. That reading experience made me consider more recent history in light of the question of how much we actually know.
When we think of major disasters—these horrible tragedies of history—we often don't know the names of every single person who was involved. We might read about the collapse of a whole civilization but not have any actual names of people, only the name of the city.
Joseph Stalin supposedly said and he was right—that the murder of one person is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. Some say Stalin never said that, and that the quote came from a 1923 essay by the German journalist Kurt Tucholsky, who wrote: “The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!"
No matter who said it, there is something very true and deeply chilling about how easy it is to erase the individuality of a human being. In Syria, half a million people are now dead, and unfortunately many of us cannot name even one Syrian victim. We have allowed this immense tragedy to become a statistic.
It’s important to name names, to give details, to memorialize individuals and not just statistics. On NPR, there was this fascinating piece about a Syrian sandwich shop that I play out for my students—“The Aleppo Sandwich: Searching For The Flavors Of A Home Lost To War”—that manages to get beyond the terrible statistics Once you listen to the voices of people who bought sheep-brain sandwiches with tomatoes, Syrian pickles, and lemon juice with garlic every day in Aleppo, you are forced to think of the tragedy in Syria as a story of individuals—of a sandwich-shop owner making unforgettable sandwiches, and of sandwich-eating customers who once had a home and a neighborhood—not just the statistics of the dead.
I try to approach historical disasters through a personal angle that fills in some of the gaps between the statistics. So, I wrote about the Holocaust through the lens of the brother of the builder of my parents’ house, whose tongue was cut out of his mouth at Auschwitz. And there is a poem in there that I took out and then I put in at the last minute about one of my neighbors in Jerusalem, who was very old and couldn't hear very well. She didn't always know what was happening. My job was to make sure that she reacted, that she ran to shelter when it mattered.
The poem is called “Insomnia in Jerusalem” and my neighbor’s name was Leah. I realized that in the collection, she represented that feeling of having all this stuff happening, and not being totally aware or not being able to react in time to save yourself or others. It’s a different perspective on genocide, but a reminder that when you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, there are a wide range of stories.
TT: That’s definitely very true. What you said about the audio clip of the Syrian sandwich shop reminds me of how the speaker identifies herself with her neighbor whose tongue was cut off in Auschwitz in your last poem, “Rereading Chapter Eleven.” The speaker, almost on behalf of the neighbor, questions God for allowing this to happen.
You also write: “Ephraim’s envy shall cease, Isaiah says, once the wolf dwells with the lamb” and “I look at you and wonder if love is only/ envy accelerated, mutual esteem/ amped to the grab of lust, the desire/ to possess the beauty another has, to ally/ not with the lamb, but the growling wolf.”
Could you speak about how the motifs of the lamb and the wolf are connected to the incredible and justified rage and how that is tied to justice in times of great horror?
AK: I love that you caught that idea of anger as justice because in the United States, there are stereotypes of anger and angry people—and often, there is this suggestion that anger is excessive or unjustified or both. But it has to be said: sometimes you're angry for very good reason. Sometimes what is happening is so terrible that you do have to go out into the streets and scream about it.
There were a few iconic sections in the book of Isaiah that I kept returning to and one of them was that famous image of the wolf dwelling with the lamb. Another was a challenging passage—Isaiah 31:8—about how Assyria will fall, but it will not fall by the sword of man. And then that idea repeats in the same verse, about how the sword will not be a human sword. I remember reading this commentator, the Malbim, who tried to understand the doubling of the sword in one passage. “Not a sword of man” doesn’t contradict angels, he says, because man contains angels. What it captures is that man is an angel and at the same time, also a sword. I couldn’t stop thinking about that concept of man as both angel and sword.
When you think about that image of the wolf and the lamb, you go back to, to paraphrase Barack Obama, what the world is versus what it should be. We can't ignore the world as it is. We see a lot of wolves.
Over the years these poems were written, a lot of wolves were revealed. A lot of swords were unsheathed. There were many concepts I might have thought we all agreed on—the right to vote, for instance, or the fact that mocking a disabled journalist was reprehensible—but no. I was lulled into that feeling, that dream and vision of the wolf dwelling with the lamb, but over and over it was shattered. In the end, Isaiah and his fury and his calls for justice felt a lot more contemporary than I ever imagined when I was a little girl.
TT: Could you speak about how you pulled the collection together?
AK: Many of these poems were written in the immediate aftermath—right after a bombing, for instance. But over the years, I added poems that were more reflective, poems that looked back and dealt with memory. What happened, in the end, is the poems spoke to each other, mimicking the idea of speaking to a poet-prophet.
I thought a lot about line endings. I knew I couldn’t compete with the rhyme and internal rhyme of Isaiah; Hebrew is a gendered language so it’s easy to rhyme many words with each other. I knew there was no way I could replicate that kind of rhyme in English. But I tried to create music in other ways. I used slant rhyme at the end of lines. I tried to work with assonance, alliteration, and repetition. In later stages, I read the entire collection out loud multiple times, had other poet friends read it to me, and I also had a friend who is a singer sing the passages that were still problematic. I wanted the music of the poems to echo against each other. And I wanted the last poem in each section to stop at the right place.
I also tried to vary how I used Isaiah’s words in poems. Sometimes I would start off with a reference to the Book of Isaiah, like in “Shards,” where the line “Babylon has fallen” is lifted directly from the Book of Isaiah. Other times, I would end the poem with it. Other times I would slip in a lifted ancient phrase.
I also tried not to have a quote next to a quote. So, for example, in the poem “Rereading Chapter Eleven,” there's a quote from the prayers as well as a quote from the Book of Isaiah, and I tried to separate them so they weren't right next to each other.
TT: What are you working on today?
AK: I’m working on a novel and a collection of essays, and I’m also completing a book of poetry translation by the terrific Israeli poet Yudit Shahar. I am hoping that after some time away, I’ll be able to complete this novel.
TT: Nowadays, there are many poets who write nonfiction and fiction, and poets are so well positioned to write prose with their lyricism. Do you have any closing thoughts, you want to share with your meters of the world?
AK: That’s such an interesting point. When I started out, with a graduate degree of poetry, that was not the case—poets stuck to poetry.
I remember that second-to-last day of class with Derek Walcott, and how he told us that the way American poets approach poetry was not how it went internationally. We had a specialization mindset in the United States, Derek said, whereas in other countries, poets were playwrights, journalists, and other things. He wanted us to understand that it didn’t have to be that way.
In the US everyone seemed to be a poet, and a teacher of poetry, and that’s it, he said. Derek just wanted us to know that there were other options—I remember him saying you could go into politics or film or theatre—and now I think you're entirely right that there are poets doing a lot of different things, working in multiple genres, and yes, trying film and even politics.
I also think the readership situation has changed dramatically. There are far more active readers of poetry than there were just a few years ago, and so I would just like to thank everyone out there who's been a part of that.
Poetry is such a beautiful part of the literary world and of the reading experience, but for so long, poetry was the least read genre. It's wonderful to see so many more poetry readers—especially new and younger poetry readers. Every time I go into independent bookstores, I feel like the poetry section is growing. Poems take up more shelves and more space. I just want to thank anyone out there who has a role in the growing bookshelves. Thank you—your interest and support mean more great poetry collections for all of us to read.
