“God loves my hair,” writes Melissa Broder in “Ciao Manhattan,” a poem in which Broder and her Creator seem to hang out, flirt, and dress up in party clothes.
In another poem, “Leah,” Broder’s biblical protagonist runs away from Canaan, works on a unicorn farm, and observes the events of the Bible, with her husband and sister-wife and children, from a far-off cloud. Perhaps Broder’s most awkward Jewish poem, and the funniest, is “Mikvah,” in which Broder waxes philosophical about her menstrual cycle, comparing it variously to seafood, pajamas, and sculpture.
Not all of Meat Heart, Broder’s just-released second book which contains these poems and others, is Jewishly-themed. But her outlook on life, both bleak and funny, is the stuff that Jewish folktales are made of.
