Other Customs and Practices
Zusman Kiselgof, member of S. An-ski’s ethnographic expedition, recording folklore in Kremenets, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine), 1912. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
My second collection, Other Customs and Practices, is now out with Glass Lyre Press. Other Customs and Practices uses playwright and ethnographer S. An-sky’s century-old questionnaire about the Jewish life cycle as a departure point for examining my own Jewish rituals, beliefs, and doubts, as well as my experience as a first-time parent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In poems that are precise and keenly observed, Leah Falk's Other Customs and Practices helps us see afresh the strangeness of pregnancy and early motherhood. These poems carry both the intimacy of sharing a body during pregnancy (when you're growing, one poem reminds us, not just another heart but also "a second brain inside") and the shock, after birth, of discovering you've made a person who's now separate from you. They consider both "our unknown ancestors' / long shadows," made visible in genes, in folk customs, and in prayer, and the bodily immediacy of a life with a small child.”
—Nancy Reddy, author of Pocket Universe
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