A stun­ning and auda­cious lit­er­ary response to the tragedy and trau­ma of the events of Octo­ber 7th, Matthew Lippman’s King of the Jews man­ages to beat once ecsta­t­i­cal­ly earnest and deeply ironized, absurd in its wit yet grim­ly seri­ous, as it pro­ceeds to anoint numer­ous Kings of the Jews. The speak­er defi­ant­ly endows every­one from kid­napped hostages to sub­ur­ban teenagers to artists and musi­cians (Charles Min­gus, Kei­th Jar­rett, Led Zep­pelin), to stu­dents, friends, his wife, and he him­self with the mes­sian­ic pow­er inher­ent in the term. Brook­lyn is named a King­dom of the Jews, and home­less­ness and naked­ness and home­osta­sis are also pro­claimed Kings. The speak­er is a dias­poric Jew­ish Every­man who bears wit­ness equal­ly to hor­ror and beau­ty as he tries to make sense of what it means to reck­on with inher­i­tance and grief, con­fronting col­lec­tive sor­row while insist­ing on remem­brance and cel­e­bra­tion. In the poem ​“My Daugh­ter Cried This Morn­ing When the Hostages Were Dead,” he writes, ​“They have been dead for 2 days and a mil­lion years. / They were dead before there were stars, / right before there were stars, / and the light from 13.8 bil­lion years that has just reached us / is an ele­gy to their lives. / Jews are astro­physics and astron­o­my, / Jews are star­dust and dust. / So is every­one / who has faith.”