Joelle Maxx Mil­man opens her debut poet­ry col­lec­tion Repart­ings: Poems of Haf­tara with these lines: “ — look it’s me, walk­ing / the pavement’s street in flat /​soled shoes[.]” The stan­za ends not­ing, ​“I’m think­ing of / flags and water­falls” and the poem, ​“1. Judges 13:2 – 25,” con­tin­ues med­i­tat­ing on the nature of G‑d, dia­logues with angels, and danc­ing, delight­ful­ly blend­ing the spir­i­tu­al­ly pro­found with the quo­tid­i­an. As a col­lec­tion, Repart­ings braids lyric poems writ­ten in response to the week­ly Haf­tara with Milman’s trans­la­tions from the Books of the Prophets. There are twen­ty-two of these pair­ings in Repart­ings. The tight con­cept of this col­lec­tion anchors the poems in a dynam­ic dia­logue with ancient Jew­ish texts under­ex­plored in poet­ry, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly pro­vid­ing space for con­tem­po­rary explorations.

Some poems, like ​“5. Judges 11:1 – 33,” echo across the Haf­tara and oth­er texts. This poem speaks of Gilead and the speak­er says, ​“I / don’t care about these men, all their / fights and all their squab­bling[.]” The poem con­cludes with an embrace of ​“fruit­ing” and rejects patri­archy and its violence:

no vows but our own, honoring

no fathers com­ing back from god’s wars, submitting

to no hands but for those angels we invite

to help me

come

to

sea—

Each of Milman’s poems start and end with em dash­es, ges­tur­ing to the con­ti­nu­ity of her think­ing and con­ver­sa­tions with­in the poems of this col­lec­tion. The dia­logue between Milman’s trans­la­tions of the Haf­tara, which are pre­sent­ed in both Hebrew and Eng­lish, and her poems inspired by the Haf­tara are dense. The crim­son cord tied to the win­dow in Joshua 2 as a sign to be treat­ed with ​“lov­ingkind­ness and hon­esty” becomes ​“a red­string tied around my thumb” that the speak­er tries ​“to dis­en­tan­gle the red / that leaks out of me and weave it into / cord I will wrap around those homes.” The tan­gles of sto­ries from the past wind togeth­er with con­tem­po­rary sto­ries of safe­ty and human­i­ty in Milman’s poems. The em dash, of course, also sig­nals the impulse of poet­ry to ground poet and read­er in the project of under­stand­ing the unfold­ing now in rela­tion­ship to the sto­ried past.

At the heart of Milman’s poems are con­tra­dic­tions. In ​“21. Oba­di­ah 1:1 – 21,” Mil­man begins, “ — I was split between two moons / the moon ahead, the moon below.” The choice of ​“ahead” and ​“below” as slant­ed par­al­lels reminds read­ers that oppo­sites are often not the com­plete sto­ry; they con­tain con­tra­dic­tions. Near the end of this poem, Mil­man writes, ​“I won­der, too, at prophe­cies / that promise same things dif­fer­ent­ly / in short books.” Through con­trast and tex­tu­al inter­play, Mil­man invites us to embrace the messy gen­er­a­tive con­tra­dic­tions of Jew­ish texts. Writ­ten in the tra­di­tion of Jes­si­ca Jacobs’s Unalone, Milman’s Repart­ings joins Joy Ladin’s The Book of Anna and Yer­miyahu Ahron Taub’s Night Breaks in the Gar­ret, invit­ing read­ers into rich, inter­tex­tu­al, poly­glot con­ver­sa­tions with­in Jew­ish traditions.