The Eating Knife is an exploration of personal and intergenerational trauma through the lens of the Akedah, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Like Abraham, the speaker’s father heard voices and directives that led to an impossible bind. The poems in this collection deconstruct and reconstitute the story of Isaac and Abraham, textually and metaphorically, as a means of stitching together meaning after violence and loss. Beyond the unspeakable, these poems hold the possibility of a new way of relating to God, sacrifice, and redemption.
Backlit by two overarching themes-the Binding of Isaac and the mental illness that overtakes the poet’s father-The Eating Knife skillfully conflates the biblical and the contemporary. Amittay’s lyrical speaker traverses landscapes as disparate as Mount Mariah and state hospital waiting rooms and holds up for inquiry subject matter as diverse as boy-band lyrics, Sharon Olds’ poems, and a Talmudic debate on the parameters of the command to honor one’s parents. Imbued with imagination, pathos, and sophistication, these vignettes surprise and shimmer. Some of them-such as “Years from Then”-will break your heart.
Yehoshua November, author of Two Worlds Exist
In her stunning debut collection, Ayelet Amittay probes primal, evergreen questions of sacrifice: what is asked, of whom, by whom, upon what altars. The biblical infant Isaac prostrated on a rock, a father unable to stamp out the voices burning in his head, a daughter as witness to and conduit of the lineages we inherit and inhabit-their codices, chemistries, and undertows. Empathetic and exquisitely crafted, The Eating Knife wrestles with complex intimacies, turning language to its sacred work as the means by which we reach toward reckoning, love, and wisdom, and those things reach back.
Lisa Olstein, author of Dream Apartment and Pain Studies
“None of us imagined ourselves here,/ but here we are” writes Ayelet Amittay, locating herself on a quaking map of silence and story, sacred text and personal narrative. This collection interrogates the “heritable silence[s]” that come to us through family, history, and tradition. The story of the Binding of Isaac haunts each page, as a prism through which the author examines her own “dark familial.” Each sparse and piercing poem reiterates: trauma is never an individual experience. Nor is suffering, beauty, healing, or the human search for what’s holy. Instead, we are braided together by ancient archetypes and the after-echoes of violence. This generous collection is a tapestry of forms: ekphrastics and abecedarians, a burning haibun and reversed scriptures. Amittay’s poems “strike awake the wick.” They will enter you and stay with you, “sleeping inside your body/ at the edge of God.”
Mónica Gomery, author of Might Kindred
Sharp, swift, and unsparing-the poems in Ayelet Amittay’s debut collection, The Eating Knife, are much like the book’s titular object. They glint in the light of our attention; they awaken to violence when held in our hands. “Tender/ the tinder bed, snap twigs/ to kindling, strike awake the wick,” Amittay writes, describing-in characteristically lush language-an altar built for a child. That’d be Isaac, of course. Abraham’s not far behind. Those two figures and the blade that nearly passes between them are central to this collection. Amittay reflects on them, reanimates them, and in doing so, undoes that knife’s work. She binds a father to his daughter, a biblical story to that father’s true crime. I lost track of the lines that I loved. I reveled in how Amittay sets each poem down as effortlessly as cutlery in a drawer. The Eating Knife is an exceptional and unflinching debut.
Derek Mong, author of The Identity Thief
Ayelet Amittay
is a poet and psychiatric nurse practitioner in Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. She received fellowships from the Yiddish Book Center and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.