Turn It & Turn It (Post-Secular Essays & Poems)

An electric collection of essays and poems by America’s most prominent feminist Jewish poet and critic.

What does a post-secular poetics look like? How might feminist midrash, irreverent play, and renewed engagement with spiritual lineages reshape the way we read? In this bold and wide-ranging collection, Alicia Ostriker—author of the groundbreaking Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America—grapples with these questions. With incisive and lyrical force, she wrestles with patriarchy without discarding its canons: reimagining biblical women as activists and tricksters, rethinking the face of the biblical Other, and helping to restore the divine feminine to Jewish consciousness.

Alongside her own midrashic interventions, Ostriker explores the work of poets from multiple traditions—like Muriel Rukeyser, Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, Gerald Stern, Paul Celan, and Mohja Kahf—who insist on engaging inherited texts while refusing to bow to them. What emerges in this vibrant collection is part literary criticism, part poetic manifesto, part spiritual testimony, and an irresistible invitation to shape a renewed spiritual imagination. Drawing its title from a rabbinic directive to study Torah over and over, Turn It & Turn It invites readers into a space where tradition and transformation meet—where the secular and the sacred are entangled, and new paths of meaning emerge.