Poetry. Paper, Perfect Bound. 66 pages
2025, ISBN: 978-1-952781-26-1 $21.95
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Just as it is audacious to stand up for justice, it is audacious to write a poem. It is audacious to read poetry. This collection of poems looks at life through a secular—albeit Jewish—lens, recognizing, even celebrating mystery, awe, joy, humor, justice and injustice without assigning divine authority. Joy Gaines-Friedler’s decision to present epigraphs by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel originates with how deeply his philosophy, theology, and scholarship move her. Rabbi Heschel’s social consciousness draws her to him and to what he calls the “Jewish prophecy of civil justice.” That belief brought Rabbi Heschel and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. together to walk arm in arm across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965.
In the poem “The Hebrew Word for Mysticism is the Same as To Receive,” the speaker drops to the ground to hold the hand of a girl suffering a seizure in a parking lot. Something spiritual takes place between these two strangers; something not explained through the notion of god, or God, yet recognized as a mitzvah, the Jewish call to action. The poems in Secular Audacity move through holidays and funerals. They take place in an amusement park, a car, an assisted living facility, a barber shop, a golf course, a city bus, the back yard while looking for monarch larvae. Joy Gaines-Friedler believes that poetry audaciously allows us to love the stranger, establish connections, and to embrace the ambiguities we live with every day.
Praise for Joy Gaines-Friedler’s work:
In a world rife with anguish, this stunning collection is the perfect antidote to despair. These poems remind us that there is beauty in the ordinary moments. Interspersed with the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a prominent Jewish thinker, Heschel’s stress on social justice, the sanctity of human life, and the interconnectedness of all beings fuse with these poems, providing profound insights into our shared human experience. “Secular Audacity” arrives at the perfect moment to chase away the shadows, and offer sustenance to those feeling the weight of the fractious world. – Kelly Fordon author of Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus, 2019) and What Trammels the Heart (SFAPress, 2025.)
In this impassioned collection of poems, Joy Gaines-Friedler writes poignantly in defense of how history functions as the palimpsest of both human compassion and human violence. There is a quality of audacious, courageous silence – a staunch witnessing – in these poems, as if we are the echoes of what our actions have wrought. In one gorgeous poem (Chevra Kadisha), which could summarize the virtuous life, Joy writes, “if, as they say, we are descendants of a single life, then caring for one is caring for all.” Indeed. These are words to live by.- Ken Meisel, author of “The Light Most Glad of All” and “Chasing Names on Nameless Water”
Joy Gaines-Friedler’s holiness is her abundant empathy, from her parents’ mortality to the horrors of October 7. This poet knows tragedy, yet, “unlike the pious whose precepts prevent disbelief,” she will preserve the bruised apples by cutting away “their damage.” Yes: secular audacity — everywhere present in this collection of old-fashioned Jewish chutzpah. – Philip Terman, author of “The Whole Mispocha”
Last Trip To The Barber
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
—A. J. Heschel
As I drove,
my father, heron-frail,
craned his neck into the wrinkled sky, said,
Sometimes I see the face of my father in the clouds.
This must be a trick—
the way what once stung me
—up close
is actually something delicate, with wings
and its own compound body.
I too looked up, seeking a sign—
—silence
fell between us.
Where did this untried trust come from?
and that look from the guys at the barber shop
when I held open the door
and they first saw him—
their eyes like startled cats
turned swiftly to contentment.
Your dad is an amazing guy.
What we don’t know, can’t know,
might fill the sky.
About Joy Gaines-Friedler
After twenty years as a professional photographer, Joy Gaines-Friedler turned her lens to the written page. Secular Audacity is her sixth book of poetry. Her previous book, Capture Theory, was a Finalist for the Forward Indies Best Book of the Year Award. Among other recognitions and awards, Ms. Gaines-Friedler’s manuscript Stone on Your Stone was co-winner with Diana Dinverno of the 2021 Friends of Poetry/Celery City Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her work is also included in the anthology 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium and has received multiple nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net.
A graduate of Ashland University Ms. Gaines-Friedler holds an MFA in Creative Writing. She has taught for community colleges and universities, as well as many non-profit organizations that include literary arts programs and programs servicing at-risk communities in prisons, shelters, and asylum homes. She currently teaches workshops in memoir and poetry both online and in her home in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
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