Awed by Rick Benjamin’s read of my chapbook:
You have to start with the title of Karina Lutz’s new collection: as if you’ve just happened upon a small group of rabbis engaged in a deep conversation about the Catholic mass. Always open to interpretation, on the one hand; closed dogma on the other. Past this front door that is also the cover walks the poet, a wild yogi herself, having been raised in the church, having defected from it, having gleaned a lot of spiritual and faith-based information since then on her own. The poems that follow are rich in irony, “sassiness,” as the poet herself says, and wisdom.
Karina Lutz is a truth-teller, the renegade who leaves the interpretive circle or morass we call midrash, in order to step into her own, Buddhist-inflected revelations. I love both her attentiveness to scripture even as she entirely circumscribes it; I admire the iconoclasm in these poems; and at times I am simply done in by the wisdom this poet brings up from the deep sediments of religious dogma and denial (of desire, disagreement, of disobedience, among other things).
Her insights are so well-earned, as in the perfectly pitched and well-tuned short poem, “Dear Emily,” where the poet says about the concept of eternity, “to ungird, to not dread,/ to not believe/ the dead are dead.” Absent the rigid, sometimes violent, always contradictory constrictions of her childhood, this poet means to call out some of the more pernicious qualities of her early schooling in religion: dread, guilt, repression, closure. And she means to move past them, forward into mystery and mysticism, toward relief and release into the unknown.
Open the cover and door of Karina Lutz’s Post-Catholic Midrashim. Step into the entry-hall with her: this is a transit worth taking.
–Rick Benjamin (state poet laureate of Rhode Island, 2012 – 2016)
You can order directly from the publisher: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/post-catholic-midrashim-by-karina-lutz/, or better yet, through your local indie bookstore.
From the introduction:
Midrashim are Judaic interpretations of scriptures, which often elaborate the stories found only in skeleton form there. In this spirit, contrary to the ways of Catholic dogma, I interrogate the social-spiritual effects of historic Catholic interpretations, including a child’s mind’s understanding. My parents raised me what I call “social-justice Catholic.” In contrast to the better-known right wing of Catholicism, this vein’s moral imperatives were to rectify inequality and end war, at least during the period I was brought up. Those values are integral to how I have moved in the world. At the same time, it took years of inquiry and vigilance—and yes, even prayer—to disentangle myself from the Church’s more insidious Patriarchal and punitive thought systems and contradictions. Forty-four years after leaving the Church, I keep having to extract and reinterrogate what hides in the early-formed folds of my brain. Therefore these poems: Post-Catholic Midrashim.
Careening between sass and earnestness, the poems rail against religion, while struggling to recover an authentic spirituality. I debate my late mother’s theology, at the same time as I try to honor her truth, her own questioning, her extraordinary intelligence, and her ability to live with/in the contradictions. I don’t so much argue with God as I argue against religions’ big lies.
Perhaps every religion places big lies next to the big truths, where the lies shine like moons through no light of their own.
Looking forward to your read…
-Karina
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