Inspired by the fragmentation and dialogue inherent in Jewish texts, Rachel Edelman’s poems reach across time and space to ask, what does it mean to make a home?

About Rachel’s work:

Featured publications

  • "The Portrait"

    WEST BRANCH

    Published in the Slow Violence folio of West Branch, curated by Sarah Ghazal Ali

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  • "Dear Memphis" triptych

    THE SEVENTH WAVE

    Three poems from Dear Memphis, which were published in The Seventh Wave’s Rebellious Joy issue.

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  • "Return" and other poems

    NARRATIVE MAGAZINE

    A finalist for Narrative Magazine’s Thirteenth Annual Poetry Contest

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  • Christmas Eve

    POETRY.ONL

    “I ma’am my husband’s aunts / like I think I ought to, / like my mother taught me / not to do my own.”

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  • "We Meet at the Well"

    LILITH

    Exile can be a place for sustained nourishment: the same activism that led me out of Jewish community came to tether me back in.

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Poetry publications

Dear Memphis
Terrain.org

The Portrait
West Branch, Slow Violence folio, curated by Sarah Ghazal Ali

Return and Other Poems
Narrative

Dear Memphis
Muzzle Magazine

Swatch Test
first published in Poetry Northwest and republished in Guesthouse,

Nocturne
Great River Review, (runner-up for the PINK Prize)

Three Poems: Dear Memphis.
The Seventh Wave, Issue 13: Rebellious Joy.

Passage
Eco Folio, Wildness

The Boy on the Beach & Decomp
About Place

Stakeout Station
Foundry

A LIMINARY ART
LOCKJAW

Essay publications

“Edelman speaks searingly of ‘what she knows of the South’ and its racial history, one in which she is uneasily embedded. Whether arriving out of personal, biblical, historical, or political stories of migration, Edelman’s poems are piercingly self-aware.”

— Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone