$16.00 paper | 97 pages
ISBN: 978-1-936970-66-7
Publication Date: April 2020
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“The question of home is at the heart of this work—and of what is it built?—of language? of history? of memory? of family? In playing with the possibilities, these poems concurrently, and carefully, build a home of sound. Beginning with a sound shaped like a tent in the desert, this work finds belonging by finding the beautiful in precise detail and in acts of attention—attention as a mode of loving and of listening to the love emitted by all things. This book makes it present.”

—Cole Swensen

“In a poem might be made a home; that is the hope of a person or a nation that wanders. In his previous book Eruv, Eryn Green put his faith in such a gamble. Now in Beit, the stakes are higher: the world is more dangerous, the survival of humans more tenuous amid forests that burn and the oceans that swell. Maybe—maybe—we were ‘never meant to survive’ as Lorde said, but how do you live in the dying, or maybe it is better to ask, how do you live through the dying? The whole of Jewish thought is an attempt at imagining the unimaginable, trying to place in words what cannot be uttered. In this way, the act of reconciling the disparity of creation requires not only scripture and philosophy but art and music and poetry; in particular a book like Beit, in which poems unhome themselves in order to wander, wander in order not to be found, but know what it is to be lost, and maybe being truly lost begin—begin—to understand just exactly what it is we are doing in this life.”

—Kazim Ali

“There is happiness in Eryn Green’s poetry, his view of the state of things. This is an astonishing accomplishment at this particular moment in the state of things. He is convincing not only about himself being  ‘Happy just to see / uneven fence posts before collapsing.’ A powerful series of poems begins six times with “Dear Unimaginable” which challenges any inability to see, to make an image. But when the poet writes ‘your love becomes the view,’ and of course means he sees his Love in every view, he has also shown that what you love is what you see. This is how a book re-teaches us how to love the world, and proves to us that we can be happy again. I am deeply grateful for these poems.”

—Bin Ramke

Eryn Green’s first book, Eruv, was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and was published by Yale University Press in 2014. Of his work, Publishers Weekly has written, “When touched by Green’s gaze, the world teems with meaning,” and Christian Science Monitor says, “The writing here demands one’s full concentration, but gives a lot in return.” Eryn’s poetry, prose, and non-fiction has been featured The New York Times, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Interim, Conduit, Painted Bride Quarterly, jubilant, Esquire, and elsewhere. Currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches creative writing, mythology, and directs the World Literature Program, Eryn lives near the Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area with his wife and daughter.