Invocation

A lyric reckoning with the violent catastrophes of twentieth-century European Jewish history, a harrowing account of mental illness and addiction, and a mystical grappling with God, Invocation is a literary debut that is at once anguished and exquisitely wrought.

Daniel Kraft’s poems confront the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of hope in the face of despair, finding new forms for devotional (and anti-devotional) poetry and midrash in the aftermath of personal and collective tragedy. Written in conversation with the legacies of Yiddish modernism and twentieth-century American poetry, and incorporating translations of biblical Hebrew fragments, Invocation weaves disparate influences to explore the borderlands between doubt and faith, agony and ecstasy.

Kraft’s poetry interrogates history, religion, prayer, and language, seeking a path towards meaning in an often brutal and seemingly meaningless world. From the wreckage of European Jewish history, the beauty and terror of biblical prophecy, and the despondency and yearning of the human consciousness in contemporary America, Invocation asks: how is it possible to live—to find beauty and divinity—in the face of crises and cataclysms? What can be salvaged from a ruined past, and how can the ruin itself become a life-affirming resource for an unimaginable future?