Book Review: The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards by Rachel Mennies

The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards
Poems by Rachel Mennies
ISBN-13: 978-0896728547
Texas Tech University Press, March 2014
$21.95; 88 pp.
Reviewed by Doug Ramspeck

In this accomplished first collection, Mennies’ poems carry many of the same fascinations and rewards as a palimpsest. For example, in the Archimedes Palimpsest, scholars discovered beneath the surface of a 13th century prayer book—existing in ghostly images on the parchment—works from hundreds of years earlier by Archimedes of Syracuse.

Mennies employs a similar method of overlaying cultural, historical, and religious influences with contemporary settings of daily life. Indeed, these poems seem to suggest that being human means recognizing that we live atop manifold layers of our own personal and collective histories, that we are to a large extent a product of those influences, the invisible ghosts still alive within us all.

The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards is concerned with Jewish heritage, tradition, and faith; it is about memory. Poems explore history, delve into belief and the Torah, and examine Jewish identity. Indeed, a quick sampling of titles offers some insight into the collection as a whole: “The Jewish Women in America, 1941,” “Amidah for Teenage Girls,” and “First Gentile,” the last of which begins:

I promise him bitterness, salt,
………………………………………the tastes of all my dead, gold and wax,
the roots of trees. Against me he is
…………………………………………..scaffolding, linen, bicep and thigh, all
newness: private liturgy of high school hunger,
…………………………………………….snow collecting on his parents’ car.

The intelligence and rigor of these oftentimes moving poems come to us from a thoughtful and intriguing new poet.

Doug Ramspeck is the author of four poetry books. His most recent collection, Original Bodies, was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize and is published by Southern Indiana Review Press. He is an associate professor at The Ohio State University at Lima, where he teaches creative writing and directs the Writing Center.