Uncle Feygele

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub's new collection of poems is rich with intimacy and longing, culled from the dual influences of both contemporary gay culture and timeless Jewish tradition. The speakers in Taub's poems find themselves squarely displaced between these two extremes, between the obligation to duty and the surrender to pleasure, the lightness of daily foibles and the darkness of long-held secrets and shame. The poems-bold, unfettered-are draped around the reader like "a necklace of whispers"-as objects both of beauty and of restraint. Taub is a poet in whose hands I feel moved and informed, comforted and implored.

This book is a dazzler for any of us who live between cultures and find it hard to negotiate between absolute identities. In poems more urgent than well-mannered, Taub cuts to the bone again and again, making lyrical incisions through history, memory and myth in a spirit of comic melancholy and lament. "Rosa, Rosa, how did it come to this?" he asks, as if speaking for all of us who have emerged from the last century complicated, thinking and feeling too much. Here is a mind embodied enough to imagine the resiliency of "a foreskin ... spontaneously sprouted!"

Uncle Feygele is a funny, insightful, and amazingly humane collection of poems. While the poems cleverly connect the seemingly disparate identities of being openly queer and an Orthodox Jew, they also manage something much bigger-illuminating the tiny struggles and tricks of memory that are a part of all human experience.

Switching back and forth from English to Yiddish, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub's poetry is at once socially engaged and sexy. The collection as a whole, which includes poems in honor of the social democrat Rosa Luxemburg and the Hebrew poet Rahel, and the "unnamed and unremembered," is beautifully crafted. His poems on men ... sizzling.