Poetry Paper, Perfect Bound. 56 pages
2026, ISBN: 978-1-952781-34-6 $22.95 $18.36 + S&H SPECIAL ADVANCE ORDER PRICE
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From the twilight of the sixth day of creation to the hellscape that was the Kovno Ghetto, Miriam Flock’s debut poetry collection navigates sacred text and lived experience with equal intimacy. These poems ask what it means to carry ancient stories in a mortal body—to bake challah knowing it is both bread and offering, to wrestle with God in the dark and recognize His image in a brother’s face.
Flock draws on Torah, Midrash, Aggadah, and a lifetime of faithful doubt to illuminate the binding and breaking that run through every life: the covenant between parent and child, the bargain struck in marriage, the terrible rulings a rabbi must make when law meets atrocity. Whether she is reading Leah’s sons’ names as a rebuke to Jacob, meditating on a phone call from someone who cannot go on, or describing the precise pleasure of plugging a crevice against a column of ants, Flock finds in the particular the irreducible human question.
As the Word Broke Open is a book of reckoning—with God, with inheritance, with the body returning to clay—written in a voice at once scholarly and deeply personal, certain of its tradition and honest about its limits.
This Is the Blessing
In the same way Moses lived his life as leader of the Israelites, so he concludes it by blessing the sons of Jacob. There’s no mention in his farewell address of his own two sons, Gershom and Eliezer.
I ask a blessing in the name of Gershom,
about whom we know only: he did not succeed
his father; a prayer for Eliezer, who’s no more
than a “begat.” If Asher dips his foot in oil
and Joseph reaps the bounteous harvest
of the moon, let the sons of Moses stand
for all of us whose names are just recorded
in the family Bible with no deed inscribed
beyond birth and dying. Say of us:
The Lord has sent them rain in its due season
and also when it pocked the grapes with mildew
and set the corn to germinating in the ear.
The Lord smote the loins of their foes
and starved their own sons at Lachish.
They have rested between His shoulders,
and they have fallen beneath His feet.
He has tested them at the waters of Meribah
and with the blood libel at Kishinev.
They have borne sons and daughters who know
but do not speak the name of God.
About Miriam Flock
Miriam Flock’s poetry has appeared in Poetry, Chicago Review, Georgia Review, Salmagundi, and other publications. Winner of the 2019 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience, Flock holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Stanford University. Her chapbook, The Scientist’s Wife, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. She is also the author of the novel Wild Grapes (Resource Publications, 2025). Flock lives in California, where she served as chief operating officer and communications director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.