""According to the mystics, the Torah was engraved with black fire on white fire. These poetic midrash too." - Jay Michaelson, author of The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path"

In his piercing debut collection, "The House at the Center of the World," poet and scholar Abe Mezrich offers a series of beautifully composed short insights on some of the most elusive passages of the Torah: the second half of Exodus, the entirety of Leviticus, and the beginning of Numbers. At once powerful close readings of the text and deeply spiritual literature, these roughly seventy short pieces...