Every poet is so different—their language and their grammars so uniquely their own—that while there are usually threads connecting them to others, what attracts a reader to a particular poet’s book is a response as sui generis as the poet’s to the world.

Language of posture,
of morals: upright, good
and crooked, bad. Think:
when is it that the body curves

Love like loaves and fishes. Wine for a wedding.

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s debut book of poetry, Salaam of Birds, is a fundamental reckoning between the intensity of life in Israel and the earthy beauty of the desert: water, sand, flowers, fruit. The poems within the collection speak to the transformation that comes from holding disparate elements that comprise a homeland like the Jewish state.

Here’s the morning again saying, look, the sun is in the trees,

earth’s hair tangled birded—

the garden a hive wound with color, dressed with names:

dill, cabbage, mustard, phlox, echeveria, aeonium—