Dayenu

Drawing its title from the Passover Haggadah, Dayenu, meaning "it would have been enough," is a collection of poems that seeks to negotiate the liberating and disjunctive problematics of place, responsibility and identity in an increasingly calamitous and unpredictable world. While not directly addressed to the long history of peregrination that its prayerful title evokes, Dayenu is nonetheless inhabited by echoes and ghosts. Approaching upheavals of the self in the same breath as disjunctions of language and upheavals of history, the poems in Dayenu bear witness to various kinds of exile and salvation, both poetic and personal, from perspectives ranging from the anthropological to the autobiographical. In the process, the text calls into question the nature and impact of the act of witness, challenging conventional notions of memory, continuity and 'home.' Put differently, while Dayenu is finding its landscape, its landscape is constantly moving. In light of this fact, the poems in Dayenu take example from Charles Olsen ("He who walks with his house on his head is heaven,") finding home as they go. The poems in Dayenu seek only to feel at rest in the world of constantly shifting borders and distinctions; to attend to the rest ever present in contented restlessness. In order to somewhat convey this sense of constant remaking, the punctuation and imagery in Dayenu is a bit piecemeal, meant to initiate a feeling of velocity and locomotion within the universe of the poems without limiting the possibilities of reading. Both the italics and long-dash/half-dash marks are intended to serve, amongst others, the function of drawing attention to the instability and materiality of language, the varying tones and sonancies of diction and the reader's active compliance in the act of poetic meaning-making. Finally, however, Dayenu is a poetic memorial to the human capacity for forgiveness and grace, even in the face of unimaginable instability and loss. At least that's how it feels to me. Dayenu is the collection of the poems that helped me realize that I believe in an indescribable kind of God. This book is the record of my witnessing stilllimitless opportunities for renewal. It is meant only as thanks.