Description

Weaves Jewish sacred texts, mysticism, human rights, and a modern voice of radical love, taking readers on a path of healing from brokenness to wholeness.
This poetry addresses the interconnection of individual, communal, and global trauma and healing, towards collective liberation.

In Hebrew, the words for wilderness, speaker, and speaks are spelled the same and share the same root letters. Goodman Herrick's title, from a poem in the collection, references the Torah's BaMidbar (in the wilderness or desert) and her ancestor's ritual practice of elevating etymology, roots, and folk word associations as spiritual meditation.

The author returns to her roots and original wholeness through reconnecting language: "Wilderness speaks/ A speaker is a wilderness."

Goodman Herrick survived sexual assault in her teens by a classmate, and left home at 14. The grandchild of an Auschwitz survivor, she's been a New York City club kid, MTV writer-producer, a peacemaker around the world, nun at a Vedanta convent, and student of Chassidic rabbis. This expansiveness lives in her poems. The book invites readers to reconsider prayer and blessing as an ongoing, fluid, language, holding space for the reverent and irreverent as prophetic.

About the Author

Anna Goodman Herrick works at the intersection of spirituality, sacred words, and human rights. She has read her poetry across the U.S., including at the Emily Dickinson Museum's Phosphorescence Poetry Reading Series, presenting "contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson's own revolutionary poetic voice." She has performed at the El Paso border for One Billon Rising’s Artist Uprising, Bloomsday on Broadway, and at the Theopoetics Conference. She has created work for television and branded content for Sony, ABC Family, Oprah Winfrey Network, and MTV and shared her work at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and in film, stage, museums and galleries nationwide.