A Precise Chaos

“These poems, fruits of a lifetime, take us so many places, from former Yugoslavia and Paris to ‘the up and down of everyday,’ and into so many corners of the heart.”

— Katha Pollitt

Jewish Book Council Review

How can contemporary Jewish poets adequately respond to the history of our time when it is continually and rapidly revising itself? How do we describe countries, languages, and borders that we experienced but that no longer exist; articulate the slippage of political beliefs that we thought were unshakeable; and remember ancestors whom we can neither locate nor even begin to imagine? Finally, what foundation can we discover, and hold in our grasp, to keep ourselves in balance against these swiftly changing narratives?

Ha’aretz Review

Art & Culture | Books

Summer Reading | From Brooklyn to the Middle East, Lots of Longing – and a Bit of Moral Reckoning

In Jo-Ann Mort's collection of poems, the yearning is for living ethically, while in André Aciman's book of novellas, it's to recover something lost. Daniel Kehlmann's novel explores how passion turns into complicity. Three new and recommended books

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Thanks to the Jewish Book Council for publishing my essay: How to Write Truths: Between Poetry and Journalism

A life-long commitment to social evolution — and, occasionally, revolution — animates the poems in Jo-Ann Mort’s debut collection, A Precise Chaos. Moving from Mostar to Oaxaca, Paris to Taormina, Poland to Israel/ Palestine, Mort’s peripatetic poems reflect her experiences as a trade union activist, a political organizer, and a peace activist in the Middle East. Refusing to evade the hard questions called for by a life honestly examined, she asks: “We, who are so righteous./Where does it lead us?”