Rabbi / Robin by Shereen Akhtar

Complex, melancholic, and sensual, the late Shereen Akhtar’s Rabbi / Robin is at a continuous crossroads of reckoning with queer, interfaith love, addiction and channeling “the expansion of this mysterious darkness and light,” in which the speaker invites us to “kiss the calligraphy/ on her skin too holy to touch. The words burn. The words are moot.” But Akhtar’s words themselves ask the reader to give so much more of themselves, to consider and make real a world beyond geopolitical boundaries and intuitional divides, to speak up and out even when “some nights one should be silent, but that, my love, was a lie.” Rabbi / Robin reimagines torn, weary landscapes with equal scrutiny and generosity where "there's a party on the moon" but also "the day of revelation" in which "the Swans ask me questions/with such love I give them answers." Imaginative as it is confrontational, and full of candid curiosity, Rabbi / Robin is about euphoric flight into the beyond and meditative trajectories that return us here, to right now, these troubling times in which “we even hold our patchwork souls/ tight behind our teeth, firm in the cheeks.” 

—Rosebud Ben-Oni