Hereverent by Katie Manning
Reviewed by Jennifer A Sutherland
Agape Editions, 2023
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Scripture is a problem of faith in the way that constitutions are a problem of democracy. Both are meaningful only insofar as they anticipate future relevance. Both are attempts to guide behavior of people not yet born based on rules made in the past. The conservative projects of faith and governance, two fields of thought once kept separate from one another in the United States and now seemingly conjoined, are fundamentally about fastening down language. Constitutions, certain Supreme Court Justices tell us, should be interpreted using the meanings white men gave words two hundred-fifty years ago. Antonin Scalia was once perhaps the most famous proponent of this originalist approach, under which words are given the meanings they had when a document was written, even if the document is now hundreds of years old. You would think that it would be more difficult to apply the same originalist approach to the Christian Bible, since the book is a collection of interpretations upon historical interpretations: the King James, source for most editions in common use, is an early Modern English rendering of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts. But millions of believers do exactly that, plucking phrases from Leviticus to justify condemning contemporary behaviors without respecting or understanding the context of the text or of its various translations.
Nevertheless, the permanence of a poetic text, its enduring freshness, the uniquely reassuring quality of language that confers membership in a community of faith: these are some of Scripture’s joys. We should hesitate to discard the language even as we seek a different relationship with it. In Hereverent, Katie Manning sifts, curates, and stunningly reconfigures Biblical narratives by breaking their words loose. The resulting poems are luminous and alive, the opposite of fastened-down.
Manning’s process was Oulipian in the sense that she gave herself a word bank and limited herself to these words in drafting each piece. She explains in an author’s note that the words for each poem came from the last chapter of each Book. She writes that she is frustrated with the weaponization of Scripture against people with disabilities, people who are not white or male or cis or straight. Genesis becomes a poem called The Book of Genes; Psalms, The Book of Maps. Likewise, Manning insightfully reworks Numbers, the book that tells the story of the Israelites’ journey from Mt. Sinai to the Promised Land. The Israelites were deeply anxious about the possibility of losing the land they had fought so hard to reach, and these anxieties expressed themselves as edicts and punishments designed to maintain cultural and spiritual identity. In one episode of this story, the Isaelites began to live among and marry Moabites, and as they did this they adopted Moabite traditions and worshiped their god. Those who remained faithful were sent to kill their former kinsmen, and from then on the Hebrews were to be cautious about straying too far from the Covenant. In Manning’s hands this often brutal chapter becomes the Book of Numb:
the heads
came and spoke
daughters
may marry anyone they please
as long as they marry
our brothers
Likewise Ruth, whose narrative is also deeply concerned with identity, especially with whether it may be freely chosen, becomes the Book of Thru. Ruth was a Moabite, someone Jewish people were forbidden to marry, and when her husband died she should have gone home to her own people; instead she chose Judaism, remained in the home of her mother-in-law, and remarried. Her great-grandson was King David, and through David, she is one of the maternal ancestors of Jesus.
the child
cared for
living
and they named him
no one
except him
will raise
the dead
Working with discrete words shaken loose from revered stories means that the poems can afford critique and even irreverence without straying into condescension or dismissiveness. A poem called The Book of Scat is one such moment. It is based on Acts, the book in which Jesus ascends into heaven, the Church is founded, and its disciples set about transforming Jesus’ message into Paul’s.
the
god
set sail and
was allowed to live by himself
for two whole years
we have not received any letters
It seems possible, at least to me, that God would want us to write kind letters to one another instead of waiting to receive them from approved sources. That would be a new and radical kind of Scripture, one that grows-from instead of fastens-down. “[F]aith / is a root // truth / a trap”, Manning writes in The Book of Mist, which is based on First Timothy, the Epistle perhaps best known for its edicts forbidding women to teach or have authority over men and advising enslaved people to “respect” their “masters.” A great deal of theological time has been dedicated to reconciling those words with John’s simple “God is love.” The poems in Hereverance wisely abandon that trap in favor of what is alive, and what loves.
The closing poem transforms Revelation (something revealed, disclosed, from one in power to one not) to The Book of Relation. Scripture need not be something handed down, it might be something related to. Relation implies relationship, something that is mutual or at least not based explicitly on an exercise of power. Relation implies that a work might be collaboratively written, experienced or lived in a way that something revealed cannot be. What is revealed is complete, it was hidden and now it can be seen but it will not be changed. What is related is in progress. It is a project of shared creation. In the Jewish Rabbinic tradition, tikkun olam means the traditions or laws that keep society intact and orderly. For many people, the phrase has come to mean something much broader, that we are responsible for more than just complying with rules. We are responsible for healing the damaged world, for affirmatively making it holy. Manning writes:
use
these words
for
a lamp
and
look
you are
written
I am
the one who
leaves
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Jennifer A Sutherland is the author of Bullet Points: A Lyric (River River Books). Her work has appeared in Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Cagibi, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Hollins University and a JD from the Catholic University of America. She lives and works in Baltimore.
ID: Cover of Hereverent by Katie Manning.
Psaltery & Lyre 