Post-Catholic Midrashim by Karina Lutz

Karina Lutz’ Post-Catholic Midrashim draws the reader in with strange and numinous poem titles, such as “Amniotic stage of the [n]ew [a]ge”, “Ash and light”, “Suicidal Buddha”. Having narrowly escaped her Catholic upbringing, Lutz chooses the Judaic notion of Midrashim to elaborate and interpret the skeletons in her intimate history. Encountering specters of parent, priest, the brokenness of dream, the beauty that still remains, she comes to this: Who knew/emptiness is the medium/of all light? As poet, she says of wisdom, I wanted to be invited in/but all I could do/was peruse the grain of the door, yet we find ourselves inside nonetheless, in the house of her poems.

–Dane Cervine, author of Earth Is a Fickle Dancer

You have to start with the title of Karina Lutz’s new collection: as if you’ve just happened upon a small group of rabbis engaged in a deep conversation about the Catholic mass.  Always open to interpretation, on the one hand; closed dogma on the other.  Past this front door that is also the cover walks the poet, a wild yogi herself, having been raised in the church, having defected from it, having gleaned a lot of spiritual and faith-based information since then on her own. The poems that follow are rich in irony, “sassiness,” as the poet herself says, and wisdom. Karina Lutz is a truth-teller, the renegade who leaves the interpretive circle or morass we call midrash, in order to step into her own, Buddhist-inflected revelations.  I love both her attentiveness to scripture even as she entirely circumscribes it;  I admire the iconoclasm in these poems; and at times I am simply done in by the wisdom this poet brings up from the deep sediments of religious dogma and denial (of desire, disagreement, of disobedience, among other things). Her insights are so well-earned, as in the perfectly pitched and well-tuned short poem, “Dear Emily,” where the poet says about the concept of eternity, “to ungird, to not dread,/ to not believe/ the dead are dead.”  Absent the rigid, sometimes violent, always contradictory constrictions of her childhood, this poet means to call out some of the more pernicious qualities of her early schooling in religion: dread, guilt, repression, closure.  And she means to move past them, forward into mystery and mysticism, toward relief and release into the unknown.  Open the cover and door of Karina Lutz’s Post-Catholic Midrashim.  Step into the entry-hall with her: this is a transit worth taking. 

–Rick Benjamin (state poet laureate of Rhode Island, 2012 – 2016)