by Rachel Mennies (Author), Robert A. Fink (Introduction by)
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.
Author Biography
Rachel Mennies's poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere, and have been reprinted at Poetry Daily. Born in the Philadelphia area, she currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.