Brooke Sahni’s In This Dis­tance exam­ines female sen­su­al­i­ty through Jew­ish girl­hood, bib­li­cal Eve, and dia­logue between Audre Lorde and Esther Per­el. The col­lec­tion begins with a con­fes­sion: ​“O, Lorde, even as a child pray­ing to HaShem, I nev­er believed in a god I could name,/I nev­er believed in a king of the uni­verse.” The speaker’s entrance to holi­ness is not through lan­guage but the body. Kiss­ing a dropped sid­dur serves as a gate­way for Jew­ish girls to con­nect with the erotics of exis­tence: ​“We were kids, 7, 8, 9 years old, clum­sy, so there was a lot/​of kiss­ing. Girls’ mouths on the blue spine of the prayer book/​which was said to hold the weight of god, so we were/​kissing the entire uni­verse.” Lat­er in the book, Eve leaves Eden to have an affair in an attempt to recov­er a part of her­self as lost as Adam’s miss­ing rib. When Eve final­ly gets the feel­ing that ​“god is so close,” she clar­i­fies ​“by which I mean I am feel­ing alive in my body.” In the tra­di­tion of Celia Drop­kin and Yona Wal­lach, Sah­ni brings the holy and the erot­ic so close that the lan­guage aches.