Talmudic Verses by Steven Shankman

You got to bring some to get some.  Steven Shankman’s Talmudic Verses joins an ancient tradition of engagement with and commentary on sacred and civic texts, and what he brings are varied resources of art and his own experience.  “Holy Distance,” for instance, sounds like a scholar of Levinas, whom Shankman acknowledges, steeped in Emily Dickinson.  One hopes readers may be drawn into this humane book and be lost.  And then perhaps found.

–Kenneth Fields

Steven Shankman’s exciting collection offers us a rare and valuable purchase on reality. He perceives history not just chronologically but also transcendentally. In his Talmudic Verses, everything and everyone are held simultaneously in consciousness—the Roman empire and the COVID pandemic; the Biblical patriarch Abraham and George Floyd; the ancient Talmudic tradition and its great modern interpreter, Emmanuel Levinas. Shankman says at one point, “Language is not a system of abstract / Signs but words spoken to me by another.” And the flexibly managed blank verse that he adopts for most of the poems here perfectly frames their spirited dialogues—dialogues in which the self recognizes the other, both in the other’s distinctness and in the other’s correspondence with the self.

–Timothy Steele