Nineveh

Nineveh takes its modernist bearings from Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan and Yehudah Amichai; but also, merrily, from John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. Zohar Atkins's poems offer humour and hospitality alongside deep learning and enigmatic, mystical theophany. The division between secular and religious is blurred, the two coexist in a generous exchange. The Bible is near at hand but rendered unfamiliar in the combination of anachronism with classical allusion. The poems produce jarring, contemporary Midrashim - interpretative retellings of canonical tales. Cain and Abel appear as business executives, Ishmael is a Palestinian dying in an Israeli hospital, Rachel and Leah are the projected identities of a demented Jacob, and God is a perfectionist who procrastinates by binge-watching TV. These poems are for intellectuals disenchanted with intellectualism and for seekers and sensualists in search of a renewing approach to language. Scholar and rabbi, Atkins has learned that poetry and not erudition offers a securer saving power.

Zohar Atkins is a poet, rabbi and theologian, based in New York. He earned a DPhil in Theology from Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BA and MA from Brown. He is the author of An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger's Critique of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His poetry won an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Other poems have appeared in New Poetries VII, Blackbox Manifold, The Glasgow Review of Books, PN Review, The Lehrhaus, TYPO, and elsewhere. Atkins is the founder of Etz Hasadeh, a Center for Existential Torah Study, and a David Hartman Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.