A Prayer of Six Wings - by Owen Lewis (Paperback)

About the Book

These poems are very Jewish, but fly beyond the enmity of Jews and Palestinians to a deeper sense: "these my sons, these my cousins."

Book Synopsis

No grief should be privileged, and no grief should be silenced.

A Prayer of Six Wings is an account of the poet Owen Lewis's experience in the year following Hamas's Al-Aqsa Flood Massacre on October 7, 2023. The poems portray the complexity of the grief shared by so many Jews of the diaspora and Israel, for the horror of the events of October 7th, the subsequent war and suffering in Gaza, and the frightening spectre of rising anti-semitism. The collection begins with "My Partisan Grief" and moves toward a shared grief across embattled borders. A number of the poems in the collection are poetic journalism pieces, inspired by newspaper headlines. Others tell the story of his Israeli family and reflect on the grief of all victims of this war, how daily life continues in fraught circumstances, and prayers for peace remain elusive.

A Prayer of Six Wings is an extraordinary book, not for the ideological but for the intellectually and emotionally engaged, and for lovers of poetry and truth. In the prophet Isaiah's vision, the seraphim attending God's throne possess six wings: two to cover the face, two the feet (possibly implying genitals), two to fly. In this study of trauma, born from the Israel-Gaza War, the poet's ego and personal history are, like an angel's, modestly underplayed. After reading in the New York Times of "Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7," he notes of himself and his wife, "For weeks after, we avoid sex." The poet has a spritely granddaughter named Noa, and when he watches a video of a young woman named Noa violently taken captive by Hamas, we understand these are all our children. The poems travel between America and Israel, between the man tearing down posters of hostages in New York City and the "vast and unforgiving desert" where "there are not pebbles enough" to place on the twelve hundred graves, and a midrashic sky in which God "couldn't possibly hold all the dead children...and the closer he drew them in, the more He cried." These poems are very Jewish, but fly beyond the enmity of Jews and Palestinians to a deeper sense of "these my sons, these my cousins." When will there be healing? Is there comfort in distance? "Forty years, my friend. Our grandchildren's children's lifetimes. Not ours." For readers exhausted by the news and resistant to the righteous rhetoric of both sides in this war, Lewis' vital and elegant, humane and compassionate work will be embraced and treasured. -Alicia Ostriker, 2024

Review Quotes

"An important book, not for the ideological but for the intellectually and emotionally engaged, and for lovers of poetry and truth... For readers exhausted by the news and resistant to the righteous rhetoric of both sides in this war, Lewis' vital and elegant, humane and compassionate work will be embraced and treasured." -Alicia Ostriker, The Holy and Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time

"As Owen Lewis says in his masterful, moving, and timely collection A Prayer of Six Wings, "I can't talk about Israel tonight...I can't not talk about Israel tonight." Many have been silenced by fear, and others are finding their voices, but few have been able to make "poetry" out of the horrific October 7th events, and their aftermath. From Owen's home turf on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where posters of the hostages were ripped down nightly, to his granddaughter's birthday party on Hahashmonaim Street, where sudden noises can be popped balloons or bombs falling, these poems of witness are both immediate, musical, and humane, as they ask, "How then, and when, can we imagine peace?" -Richard Michelson, Sleeping as Fast as I Can

"These lovely, lyrical poems reach across oceans and centuries as Lewis skillfully links the hostages in Gaza to his own grandchildren, the founding of Israel to his own birthday, and biblical history to our contemporary moment. Lewis has composed a haunting book of striking conflations." -Yehoshua November, The Concealment of Endless Light

"These poems blur the boundaries between private and public mourning, asking what it means to grieve for strangers, creating a new and stark language for grief, divided families and the persistence of everyday life." -Joanna Chen, Frayed Light (translator)

"It calls and it calls and it tears the heart. So precise, it's precise until it hurts. Here the prophet Joel comments on "from generation to generation", from the generation of the prophet 2500 years ago: About this to your children, tell the story, to your children to their children to the generation after." -Yossi Yzraeli, Echoes from the Cellar of the Contrabass

"A Prayer of Six Wings is lovely, sad, wide-ranging in its learning and mourning, devout without piety, prophetically angry, and most of all, steadfast in love of family and humanity." -Dan Bellm, Practice: A Book of Midrash

"As Owen Lewis says in his masterful, moving, and timely collection A Prayer of Six Wings, "I can't talk about Israel tonight...I can't not talk about Israel tonight." Many have been silenced by fear, and others are finding their voices, but few have been able to make "poetry" out of the horrific October 7th events, and their aftermath. From Owen's home turf on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where posters of the hostages were ripped down nightly, to his granddaughter's birthday party on Hahashmonaim Street, where sudden noises can be popped balloons or bombs falling, these poems of witness are both immediate, musical, and humane, as they ask, "How then, and when, can we imagine peace?" -Richard Michelson, Sleeping as Fast as I Can

On "(from captivity) When living children" "In its divisions and joinings of words, a lyric voice has found a way to create a disordered language in which to render this new poem's subject as lived truth. This poet's empathetic imaginings, no matter their source, become a lyric cry on behalf of those whom the poem speaks of."

-Marcia Karp, If By A Song

Judge of the 2024 E.E. Cummings Prize

"A Prayer of Six Wings is lovely, sad, wide-ranging in its learning and mourning, devout without piety, prophetically angry, and most of all, steadfast in love of family and humanity." -Dan Bellm, Practice: A Book of Midrash