“In her astonishing debut, Tikva Hecht writes, 'I tell you,// my tongue hurts from all this/ in a different language// than my longing first spoke.' And yes, how precisely these poems forge a language from the edge of the self, through a wilderness of faith and desire. I found myself holding my breath as I read Hecht’s poems, startled by the depth of her reach and revelation, “as if words could imitate the rush of waves.” Reader, this is one of the most realized and sublime debuts I have encountered—like all true art, it offers the complex and necessary gift of a world made stranger, and more alive."
— Allison Benis White, author of Please Bury Me in This
"These fiercely intelligent and achingly lonely poems braid together longing for human connection, longing for God, skepticism, and existential isolation. Like Emily Dickinson's, the business of Hecht's lyrics is circumference: in language as intimate as it is abstract, as tender as it is savage, these poems summon us to see the human condition – the poet's and our own – from deep within and high above at the same time, 'to bind our longing / into sheaves and call it prayer.'"
— Joy Ladin, author of National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna and Shekhinah Speaks
“Tashlikh is an impossibly stunning debut, and Tikva Hecht will be read and revered not just for her luminous, patient artistry, but because these poems, in the end, stare down the human who dared walk through such doors. If Hecht is a religious poet, it’s primarily because she deepens the religion itself, her vital body and mind startling ancient rituals with honest ache and unabbreviated longing."
— Katie Ford, author of If You Have to Go
Order Tashlikh from Ben Yehuda Press
Also available on Amazon.com or Amazon.ca
ISBN: 978-1-953829-52-8
Tashlikh (lit. cast away) is a ritual performed on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year. Small pieces of bread are cast into a body of water accompanied by a prayer that our sins may be discarded similarly. Tashlikh mesmerized me as a child: the image of past actions being like crumbs — innocuous, but look, they are everywhere; the desire to discard the past with a light toss of the hand, the ways in which this is possible, the ways in which it is impossible; the elegant and dangerous water as the site of forgiveness; the overall imaginativeness of the whole ritual, so physical, so ethereal, so strange. I write about all this directly in the collection's title poem “Tashlikh,” but it wasn’t until the book was complete that I realized the whole thing is a meditation on these themes.
This book is about the longing to cast away — to cast away and to cast towards — and the numbness that can get in the way. And it's about how these longings, at least for me, get expressed in a bewildering tug-of-war between the earthly and the empyreal, so I’m never really sure, are sins like crumbs or crumbs like sin? There are poems about heartbreak, grief and makeshift angels, a couple of appearances by dancers from the Ballets Russes and some pieces in talmudic form. Above all, I hope that these poems do the job of putting words to the small tremors of life, the toss of a wrist, the rush of some water, and that readers find some beauty in them.
About Tashlikh
Sample poems from Tashlikh
Apology in the form of Necessity
(published in Grain Magazine, Fall 2020)
Still the roses open wider,
a week old or two weeks,
the last petals of their hopeful bodies
already the texture
of a souvenir
dry and industrial and
under the force of touch,
see, they are unmoving
or they crumble. See,
this decay, and still, how wide
like gaping monsters
they become
as if to say,
No, it is not like that—
between life and
death,
balance
is not the word you want.
She Tells Me She Has Suicidal Thoughts
(published in Untethered Magazine, vol. 13)
so many
so many
so this was where her voice lay low
these past weeks, and now they imitate
the waves that rushed us, first time
at the ocean, jeans rolled to the thick of our calves
and still it wasn’t long before we wore
a sample of the ocean’s body, clothes heavy as a child
swinging from our necks; sat then like happy things
who had never forsaken movement, and language
was a tonic of breath and salt and a pulse impatient
with life, brimming with life,
with only sound for what we knew
by heart, saying over and only
so beautiful
so beautiful
over and again
as if words could imitate the rush of waves,
carry us where they might