WAyfarers
Selected by Marianne Boruch as winner of the
2024 Off the Grid Poetry Prize
Written in the wake of the sudden disappearance of her nephew, Medved’s Wayfarers tells of the struggle to process loss without any physical anchor. Threaded through these poems are clues to navigating our time on earth left for us by the Jewish Sages. Part memoir, part spiritual exploration, Wayfarers charts the journey from pre-birth, to life in the physical universe, to the departure of the spirit from the body, which all human beings traverse.
Wayfarers was selected for the 2024 Off the Grid Poetry Prize by poet Marianne Boruch, who praised the astonishing breadth of these poems: “Nothing is left out of this book, not bafflement, not the horrific-gone-mundane too often now, not beauty regardless, not even astonishment. All mark our immediate ancient moment.”
“We grow old. Our parents die or hang on barely. Our take on this changes color, depending on what afternoon, how angry/hopeless/resigned we get. It’s one of poetry’s—and this poet’s—great, honorable subjects along with time itself. ”
“There is so much verve and wisdom in Jane Medved’s Wayfarers. These poems reckon with loss and, more essentially, in living with loss as she wonders if she ‘can still pass for forty, for fifty’ all while recognizing ‘the indifference / of gravity.’ Medved’s voice is deeply idiosyncratic and delightfully bizarre—‘We are the glittering / beaten promise of gladness—‘ as she navigates her ‘Family Archive,’ her country, her religion, and her truest self. ‘Life,’ she tells us, ‘is propelled by many hungers,’ and I find myself hungrier and hungrier for more Medved poems.”
“’Who wouldn’t want to rise every day / with a new warm heart,’ Medved writes, asking for rescue and mercy. Wayfarers collects poems that run into rough truths. There’s such pleasure in how many ways these poems take on the resistance of perfection, the ‘secret crown / of defects’ and the exhaustion of parents, each time landing us square in the most honest pockets of feeling. Are we scorched by such forthright testifying? No, we’re seen. The speaker in these poems follows time as ‘a path or a wheel’ and—with vulnerable seeking—moves along, sometimes even to praise.””
About the Author
Jane Medved is the author of Deep Calls to Deep (winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press) and the chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press). Her translation of Wherever We Float, That’s Home (by Maya Tevet Dayan) won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize (Saturnalia Books 2024). Her poems have been anthologized in Contemporary Jewish Poetry (Greentower Press 2023) and Ache, The Body’s Experience of Religion (Flipped Mitten Press 2024). Her awards include the 2021 RHINO translation prize and the 2021 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize – Honorable Mention. She is the poetry editor of the Ilanot Review, and a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv.
