There Is No Place Without You - (Jewish Poetry Project) by Maya Bernstein (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Maya Bernstein's debut volume presents poems rigorously composed and delicately honed. It reveals the sensitive spirit and sharp mind of a mature speaker exploring the gaping space between the infinitude of the divine and the finite nature of human existence.

Authentic and honest, spanning the secular and the sacred, these poems challenge and speak truth to our fears and joys, navigating the complex intimacy and distance we experience as humans striving to connect to ourselves, one another, and to the forces that act upon us in the world.

Review Quotes

In Maya Bernstein's debut collection, There Is No Place Without You, a speaker attempts to balance-impossibly, ecstatically-her roles as mother, wife, cancer survivor, and observant Jew. The "you" of the book's title slips and slides from poem to poem, an elusive interlocutor who is sometimes the beloved, sometimes illness or memory, sometimes the divine. Always imaginative and often subversive, Bernstein's poems compare the body to "the ancient gates / of the Old City // of Jerusalem," the self to a predatory nightbird "on the prowl," and even the heart to "a flopping fish" caught in a net. Bernstein reminds us there are traumas we cling to and traumas, in return, that cling to us, that all of us possess both hidden and visible scars.

- Jehanne Dubrow, author of Wild Kingdom and Taste: A Book of Small Bites

Maya Bernstein looks underneath: underneath motherhood is independence; underneath death is time; underneath love is a long list of questions. In poems of ritual, unearthing, celebration, and lament, Bernstein reframes what is evident by asserting its necessity: a tree, a tradition, an absence, a presence. Through prayer and yearning, these poems give shape to desire, and each desire is filled with its own tension: "Who will I be if I be / come capable of dreaming of linen, of lace?" Deft in form, and demonstrating depth of engagement with existential questions, these poems fulfill one of poetry's vocations: to call our attention to attention.

- Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet and host Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios

Bernstein's poems brim with energy and sound, moving the reader around a world mapped by motherhood, contemplation, religion, and the effects of illness on the body and spirit. Her language is lyrical, delicate, and poised; her lens is lucid and original. These are poems to savour, to return to, and to pack into the suitcase of life.

- Anthony Anaxagorou, author of After the Formalities