The Book of Noah - by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This collection of poems addresses global warming and climate change. The Biblical figure Noah appears in many of the poems, seeming as real and contemporary as your next-door neighbor. The complexity of our love for the world, even as we disregard it, is evident in these nuanced poems. This poetry book is also a book of history and science, spirituality and ecology.

Review Quotes

The poems in Yoni Hammer-Kossoy's The Book of Noah touch on the spiritual and communal even as they warn against the horrors of climate devastation. In the capable hands of Hammer-Kossoy, the Noah of the Biblical flood becomes a very real metaphor for our times.

-Peter Grandbois, author of Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years

In The Book of Noah, Yoni Hammer-Kossoy's timely debut, Noah is everyone--the reader, the narrator, the Biblical figure--worrying about what the neighbors will say or why they don't see the coming flood, talking about God behind God's back, and loving the world to death. Literally. This is a tender goodbye to our kingdom of pewter sky and roiling sea, alphabets of extinction, inventories of our rusted sheds. The Book of Noah speaks for our time of stricken guilt and uncertainty, our reckless love of the world, with intelligence, humor and even hope.

-Marcela Sulak, author of Mouth Full of Seeds and City of Skypapers

"This is how it feels / to be a forest: each tree alone / within reach of another." So begins The Book of Noah, a profound exploration of belief and defiance, of the body and the search for something greater. Both celebration and elegy, these poems work as wicks to ignite a necessary fire. Each is a single ripple in an ocean swelling beyond control.

-John Sibley Williams, author of The Drowning House

Yoni Hammer-Kossoy's The Book of Noah is written out of an acute awareness of catastrophic climate change in a stunning, highly original, and entirely non-preachy and non-intimidating manner. It is funny. It is hopeful. It shows us why our duty to earth is sacred.

The collection is an ongoing conversation with Noah, the biblical hero who heeded the warnings of impending doom, thereby saving man and beast from annihilation. Hammer-Kossoy uses the mythology to put the question before us: should we heed-or continue to ignore-the warnings of the ecological doom we are facing today?

-Ofira Koopmans, from Reading Jewish Fiction