In BOOK OF FAILED SALVATION, her second collection, poet and rabbi-in-training Julia Knobloch chronicles a relationship that spanned continents before coming to an end. In these poems, complicated Jewish histories intertwine with a yearning for consolation, while prophets dance and cypresses tower into the sky. Knobloch’s exploration of loneliness resonates with our own losses, and her questions about creating our salvation are rays of light illuminating life from unexpected angles.

In these intensely felt and exquisitely wrought poems, the focus on love, loss of love and the personal journey opens profound perceptions through language steeped in both the sacred and profane. While concretely personal, the poems insist on their location in nature, history, and tradition. ‘What’s unplanned can seem prophetic, ’ the poet writes in musical lines that reflect the movement made by an exploratory mind as it examines its own feelings and insights, and in the process creates poems that surprise and excite.

• Linda Stern Zisquit, author, Havoc: New and Selected Poems

The beautiful poems in Julia Knobloch’s Book of Failed Salvation express a tender longing for spiritual, physical, and emotional connection. They detail a life in movement-across distances, faith, love, and doubt. The poems vividly evoke the lived experience of a number of places, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, and Los Angeles, each landscape always changing like the restless speaker who seeks a knowledge and an experience of what the poems unapologetically call ‘salvation.’

• David Caplan, author, Into My Garden