Winner of the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize

Selected and with an Introduction by C.D. Wright

 
“Alicia Jo Rabins’ poems bring together the spiritual, the surrealist, and the erotic. Their wild imagination and fierce passion are aroused by hunger of the soul, and they use poetic intelligence as a desperate hammer to break through the ordinary self, to union, or reunion—with what? The Sufi ghazal, the Zen koan, and the Hassidic parable— those traditions are alive here with transcendental mirth, lots of duende, and lots of sobriety. This beautiful agonizing mess—these poems drag you right into the middle of it.”  —Tony Hoagland

“'We dreamed of immortality / We flexed our young flanks' writes Alicia Jo Rabins. In Divinity School, the eternal and the body are never far apart. Slipping with ease between sex and G–d, birth and death, dinosaurs and mermaids, no mystery seems beyond the reach of these poems. This is a gorgeous book—roiling with desire and awe, it stretches toward the divine, while offering a resonant meditation on the astonishment of being human." —Matthew Olzmann

 
“Divinity School is a first book of final questions, a book that makes the great mysteries as real as potholes but does not presume to know how to fill them. Nevertheless the need to ask is enormous.”   — C.D. Wright (from the Introduction)
 
Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, musician, and Torah scholar. She teaches ancient Jewish texts to children and adults and performs internationally as a violinist and singer.