Lisa M. Miller’s Woe & Awe is a brave and wit­ty Jew­ish poet­ry mem­oir that tells the truth about life’s hard­ships and its par­al­lel beau­ty — what she often helps read­ers and audi­ences see as the ​“full-life recipe that none of us can live with­out.” Woe & Awe not only encour­ages read­ers to see the strength of their own per­se­ver­ance but gives much cred­it to the work of Jew­ish ances­tors, their opti­mism and grief, their love and great for­ward-motion — exam­ples of how to ​“Dri­ve Through The Impos­si­ble Yes” and how it’s our moth­ers and theirs, who help shape our abil­i­ty to say Yes down the gen­er­a­tional line. Woe & Awe gives cred­it to the pow­er and essen­tial sus­te­nance of Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty.

Miller’s sto­ry­telling inten­tion­al­ly serves as a heal­ing balm for the mod­ern com­ing-of-age jour­ney where arrival isn’t a des­ti­na­tion but an unfold­ing into the wis­dom of mid­dle-age through moth­er­hood, career, and a rela­tion­ship with God. Poems like ​“Cen­tral Ner­vous Sys­tem May­im” and ​“Menuchat Ha’Nefesh” remind us to look to the nat­ur­al world of cre­ation when con­sid­er­ing ourselves.