Dybbuk Americana (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Gottlieb-Miller, Joshua

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

Inventive poetry explores Jewish identity in America "How can I teach a prayer / I only know how to recite?" "America, whose death / didn't you come from?" These are some of the questions that poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller wrestles with in his beautiful, gripping new collection. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one's child. This hybrid text draws on art, mysticism, and history, taking the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor. A dybbuk is a restless spirit who inhabits another's body, and as a possessing spirit the dybbuk is often treated as a demonic force, but it can be read as merely trying to climb the ladder of the afterlife. In other words, a kind of striver. Enacting the idea of competing selves in one body, Dybbuk Americana plays with form via a series of text boxes that create a multi-channel effect on the page. The body of the poem can be read with surrounding and intercutting text boxes to generate multiple interpretations. This innovative poetic technique maintains a dialogue with Jewish literary lineages: Talmudic commentary and interpretation of the oral law, as well as the fragmented nature of geniza, a place where Jews store sacred documents when they fall out of use. Dybbuk Americana weaves together the father-son arc within a larger socio-political commentary and historical narrative. Poems move deftly between the ironic and the mystic, from aphoristic questioning and inventive narratives, to interview, oral history, and archival materials. In these lines, "the angels./ They get as close as they can." Witty, curious, warm, and searching, Dybbuk Americana signals a fresh voice in Jewish-American poetry. [sample text] CHAIN MIGRATION It took ten men to make a minyan, but only one name of G-d for us to share, so we settled on America, one by one, we settled on America, man and woman. My grandfather earned his way over shoveling coal in the hold of a boat. Grandmother sewed gold into her coat. In secret they sewed, they sold, they glowed. I dream of gold. G-d's name in gold milked and honeyed in the dust beneath our boots? our dust. And when they made a minyan and didn't realize it? And when they married in and didn't realize it? No matter: they sewed, they sold, they glowed. Yes, they sold their solid gold, sold gold into gold, sewed gold together into dust. When I was born they gave me a dead man's name. But that's true for everyone.

Most of the poems in THE ART OF BAGGING were written while Joshua Gottlieb-Miller worked in a grocery store, often in fragments on the folded-up piece of paper he kept tucked in his pocket. Gottlieb-Miller worked at Trader Joe's after getting his undergrad degree, left the store to pursue an MFA, and then returned after completing his advanced degree. Feeling stuck, watching time tick away stocking shelves, Gottlieb-Miller found himself dreading the store but writing more and more. This is a hybrid book. Because so many of his co-workers said or did things that inspired poems, Gottlieb-Miller knew he wanted to interview as many as he could. Many of these poems of retail labor are informed by meditations on visibility or invisibility, the accessibility of the setting and that frustration giving way to lyrical and meditative flights. The book's arc traces the speaker's recognition of these workers' shared positions--thoughtful individuals enmeshed in a singular, larger system--within an economic and, by the end of the book, metaphysical space. 
"The Art of Bagging unpacks the American obsession with livelihood-as-personhood. Through an inventive structure--spare lyrical narrative, surprising aphorism, and raw interview--Josh Gottlieb-Miller works over definitions of what work is. The grocery store is only a setting, a crucial one though, for the book's astonishing revelations. This is ontology bagged, in which disparate voices are identified (a rarity for poetry of labor) and the apocrypha of retail work is examined. Here's an example of Gottlieb-Miller's ars poetica from the powerful 'The Fiction I am a Grocery Store Employee,': 'I've already divided/what's false from true./As in a shortcut you/can only use once.' Later, in 'Grocers Debate the Apocalypse For Its Effect on Backstock,' the poet writes, 'I don't like to be reduced,/even to something bigger than me.' I am grateful for this book."--Martha Serpas 
"Do you think you would go out of your way to see an opera if it was about a grocery store?" Joshua Gottlieb-Miller asks at the very beginning of The Art of Bagging. What follows is extraordinary, lyrical, invigoratingly intelligent and, indeed, operatic. In this hybrid collection, Gottlieb-Miller considers the grocery store as a site for meditations on vast economies, complex labor systems, and the ordinary, often nearly invisible, people who work within them. Always thoughtful and humane, the poems are unified by Gottlieb-Miller's own voice--a voice characterized by wit, warmth, keen awareness, and a desire to understand the many worlds of the grocery store and those who labor alongside him, within it."--Kevin Prufer 
Poetry. Hybrid.

The Art of Bagging

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Books by Gottlieb-Miller, Joshua

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Dybbuk Americana (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Dybbuk Americana (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

The Art of Bagging