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...

Prayers of a Heretic explores the "crime" of heresy and the condition of existential displacement through the language of prayer and prayerful voice/s. In the first section, "Visits and Visitations," the poet imagines a variety of protoganists in situations of supplication. The second section, "In the Gleaning," examines the life, trangressions, and prayers of the title character and the primacy of books, libraries, and reading for refuge and reconfiguration. Eschewing a secular/religious divide, the book offers an expansive interpretation of the enduring power of prayer. Four poems...