Description:
"Aurora Levins Morales's poetry radiates wisdom, warmth, and fortitude. A prophetic, life-centered guide for times of tumult and struggle."
--Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents
Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of rupture and uncertainty, beloved movement poet Aurora Levins Morales brings us a prayer book for the street, for reconstituting the future through our gestures in the present. In these poems of devotion and protest, Levins Morales speaks across and through time with an undeniably prophetic voice. Written in collaboration with various communities looking to honor, unravel, and rebuild Jewish liturgies, Rimonim is a book of lyric in the most immediate sense--of poems that are meant to be read and sung. Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present, these poems will both accompany specific Jewish practices and offer inspiration for the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice.
Ultimately, these forty-nine poems honor the forty-ninth year, when it was taught that everything in the land would begin anew, everything redistributed and freed, when the people would see that everything on this earth was "ready to wake and bloom / just under the skin of what is."
Brief description: Born in 1953, Juana Alicia had many rich cultural influences growing up in Detroit, near Diego Rivera's Industry murals, in a Spanish and Yiddish-speaking household within a majority Black neighborhood. In her teens and early 20's, she was swept up by the Chicanx Movement, particularly the United Farm Workers struggle. She was recruited by Cesar Chavez to work with the union in Salinas, which she did from 1971-76. This was key to her education as an artist and activist. She has worked as a muralist, printmaker, sculptor, illustrator, and studio painter since then. She worked for forty years as an educator: elementary, migrant, and bilingual education, in arts academies and universities, before retiring seven years ago to dedicate herself full-time to her artwork. Her experience as a mother and a grandmother has also informed and given greater meaning to her artistic production.
Her style, akin to genres of contemporary Latin American literary movements, can be characterized as magical and social realism, and her work is frequently inspired by literature. She has moved back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border for many years, and since 2006, has resided part-time in Mérida, Yucatán, and in Berkeley, California. She has created murals in both places, and her binational experience has inspired the project which she is currently completing with her author husband, Tirso González Araiza: to illustrate the Yucatec Mayanfolktale, LA X'TABAY, which will be exhibited this summer at the SanFrancisco Arts Commission Gallery and in the fall at the Museum of Anthropology in Mérida. Working in both countries has enabled her to form connections and create projects with artists, environmental activists, feminists and indigenous communities in Mexico and the United States.Review Quotes: "Aurora Levins Morales's poetry radiates wisdom, warmth, and fortitude. A prophetic, life-centered guide for times of tumult and struggle."
--Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents
--Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
"An answered prayer! A prayer itself! This book is such a glorious remedy to carry us through our days and seasons. Drawing on a lineage of revolutionary poet-prophets, Aurora Levins Morales roots into the fertile margins and weaves the liturgy we need for these times of fire and crisis. Infused with water and stone, these prayer-poems irrigate and ground us, (re)orienting and (re)organizing us to earth, to each other, to ourselves, and to what we hold sacred. Blessed are we and blessed is she for bringing forth this generous, gorgeous, much needed and desired offering."
--Dori Midnight, community care practitioner, ritual leader, and writer "Rimonim is a sacred offering. Simultaneously rooted and ephemeral, sensory and transcendent, of the earth and of the spirits, this book is a gift to organizers and seekers everywhere. Aurora Levins Morales weaves together our past with our present, daring us to imagine a future born from our most liberated dreams and desires. It's one of those 'keep by our bedside' books that I will return to over again, with deep admiration and gratitude."
--Audrey Sasson, executive director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice "Aurora Levins Morales's liturgical work is not just poetry; it's a divine echo of comfort, legend, and ethereal beauty that resonates deeply with those in need of ethically aligned spiritual nourishment. In Rimonim, Levins Morales masterfully weaves her ancestral spiritual heritage with sophisticated, nuanced, and precise understanding of the most urgent calls for justice and liberation of our time. This is the poetry of a true tzaddik, whose legendary work facilitates healing and opens portals of possibility and hope, guiding us toward a more inspired, compassionate, and just future."
--April N. Baskin, founding director of Joyous Justice "This healing, generous collection from the voice of a treasured, prophetic elder in medicine for the long haul. An abundant collection of seeds, the poems of Rimonim celebrate and affirm that we are interconnected, embedded in a sacred web of those who rest, rise, labor, love, sow, weave, grieve, and give. These breathtaking poems and prayers invite us to lay down our 'illusions of separation' and to know that 'each wound is full of possibility.' Rimonim offers so much to our multilingual, multiracial, intergenerational, diasporic Jewish communities and movements for justice. I am so grateful for this long-awaited collection and the world conjured within it. 'Bless me, ' Levins Morales writes and generations will echo, 'for this is the time and I am awake.' Que viva! Amen!"
--Mónica Gomery, author of Might Kindred "Aurora Levins Morales has gifted us an exquisite collection of poetic prayer and prophecy that can lift our spirits, embolden us to listen to the truth of our innermost experience, and open the channel of holy connection that flows between us, our ancestors, and 'the breath of life in all things.' For those of us tho already engage with Jewish liturgy, this book will change the way we pray. For those of us who struggle to recognize ourselves in Jewish liturgy, this book will make it possible for us to pray. And for all of us, whether or not we have a relationship with Jewish prayer, this book opens a window into the beauty and struggle of a life lived with integrity, clarify, and sacred connection to all that is."
--Rabbi Dev Noily, Kehilla Community Synagogue "Aurora Levins Morales has provided the words we need at a time when our pain and yearning have rendered so many of us speechless. Liturgy and lament, prose and praise, this collection represents an extraordinary exploration of the landscape of the soul. Simultaneously cosmic and intimate, Levins Morales's writing is populated with characters who live with and within you, from abuelos to garment workers to biblical matriarchs. This volume promises to be beloved in the bedroom and on the bimah, and everywhere in between."
--Rabbi Michael Rothbaum, Congregation Bet Haverim