“Read the newspaper. Please, read it now.” So implores Victoria Redel in “Chapter 11,” the final chapter in her poem “A True Story.”

I have been reading the newspaper too much. Ever since the golden escalator. Obsessively checking, especially since January 20, 2025, the NY Times’ live feed. If I could refresh the page less frequently, I would have more time for paradise.

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The true story Redel tells is about her great grandfather who “played flute in the orchestra of the Turkish Sultan.” The story she tells is about her grandfather who was eleven when his father died and that at some point he “fled Russia for Romania” and that “in 1938, a husband & a father, he fled Romania for Paris with Persian passports & in 1942 he fled Paris for Lisbon securing passage for his family [a wife and a child] on a boat to New York City.” Redel tells us what she’s been told. She tells us about her mother who, “[d]uring the 1979 oil embargo” called Redel’s “college dorm,” and, “her voice a panicked whisper,” told her daughter not to tell anyone her passport was Persian.

“So many parts of this story,” Redel writes, “I’ll never know.”

For instance, “I don’t know,” she writes in Chapter 7, “if my great grandfather was born in Turkey or Russia or Egypt, but I know he died in Constantinople while my grandfather was a boy in Egypt.”

Even if Redel hadn’t asked, at the beginning of the final chapter of “A True Story”—a poem included in Paradise, her most recent book of poetry—“Why does any of this old story matter?,” I wouldn’t have had to wonder about its relevance at this moment in the American story, the world’s story.

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My kids sent me a small gift for Father’s Day this year. It’s 4 ½” x 6 ½”. One hundred and twenty-two pages. Yes, it’s a book. A book I’ve wanted since I’d seen the announcement of its publication. Publication date: March 25, 2025. I resisted the urge to buy it for myself. I have too many books as it is. I’ll never get to read them all, or reread those that have dissolved inside me and become so much a part of who I am I’m not even aware of the ways they inform my thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing. In other words, I’ve forgotten them. If I wouldn’t be able to own and read it, I could purchase it for my son. But he’s so busy with his work as an appellate attorney right now, I didn’t think he’d have time to read it. I never mentioned my interest in this book to any of my kids. A moment after the package arrived in the mail, I opened it. What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, Brian Eno and Bette A. I fixed a cup of tea and immediately read the first thirty pages. But I had to stop there and return to a different book in preparation for an event I’m about to host in conjunction with Yetzirah’s third annual Jewish poetry conference in Asheville, N.C.

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I’m rereading Paradise, Redel’s most recent collection of poems, that includes “A True Story.” Beginning with some midrashic poems, retellings of the story of the Garden of Eden, the book moves on from there to poems about family, childhood, adolescence, parenting, desire, aging, memory, menstruation, and more. Poems that, at a glance, don’t appear to have anything to do with paradise and the loss of paradise, with expulsion and exile. Yet, on a fourth and fifth reading, I see how deeply connected some of the common experiences of, say, aging, are to the experience of being expelled from home. Memory: home. Menstruation: home. One day you look back: once I could remember what I came into the room for. Once, “[t]he plush, thick insistence” of a period. “Lunar declaration, my flag,” Redel writes in “Ode after Menopause.” “I miss the blood,” the poem begins.

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I may never read Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street. I may never read Elliot R. Wolfson’s Language, Eros, Being. I may never read George Steiner’s The Poetry of Thought. Glancing at these and other books on the shelves in my study, I feel defeated. Any one of these books could be the one that returns me to home. Home: whole, clear, seen and seeing. A state of being. Exile: a condition in which one is reminded, whichever way one turns, this isn’t it, this isn’t exactly what I’m longing for, what I’ve been longing for and excluded from for a long time. I can’t tell you what paradise is, but I’ll know it once I’ve found it.

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Rereading Paradise. A collection of poems I first read a few years ago. I read it to prepare for a meeting of Yetzirah’s book club. I’m the host. Most sessions begin with a conversation between the poet whose book we’ve read and me. The more times I read it, the more it opens to me—each poem and the collection as a whole.

In “Stuck Human,” Redel recalls not fitting in with other girls, presumably middle- or high-school girls. Some were “horses, / who nickered and whinnied through school / hallways.” Others were “[c]ats with milk / throated purrs,” and others where “spider girls, / leggy & fatal in black tights & boots.” Who was Redel among those girls? Who is she now?

But I am just as I was then, stuck human,

opposable, & reluctant, two arch fallen feet,
my only possible transformation this language,
our infinite, recursive tongue.

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When I read the newspaper, I don’t feel transformed. Sometimes I feel informed. Sometimes, especially these past ten years, I feel enraged, frightened, helpless. With the exception of the few times I may reread an article to remind myself of some information contained in it, I never reread the newspaper.

But as my experience of reading, rereading, and again rereading Victoria Redel’s Paradise has reminded me, in the presence of powerful poetry I do feel transformed. “Dominion” reveals to me the real reason we left the Garden: “The animals had no love for us. / We did not lie tenderly with the lion.” We were frightened. “There never was a fall,” the poem concludes. “We stood; we ran.” What’s the real reason we left the Garden? “We were restless,” Redel writes in “You Called It Paradise.”

It is not true that we fled

at the end, or that it was an end.
When we found the gate,
of course, we opened it.

Restless: curious. What’s on the other side?

We fled; we didn’t flee. Both true.

*

“Do you have a map of the world?,” Redel asks at the end of “A True Story.” “The map keeps changing.”

We keep changing. That’s why rereading is essential. Every time you return to a text you have already read, it will reveal more of itself to you. Or, more accurately, perhaps, with each rereading more of yourself may be revealed to you. And that may be how you find your way home.

Richard Chess has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Nailed to the Doorpost. Professor emeritus from UNC Asheville, where he directed the Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years, Chess serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, where he co-directs its Faith in Arts project. You can find him at www.richardchess.com .