The Brooklyn Rail

It is a testament to the powers of any writer whose book can make the committed atheist reader reconsider faith. Almost. Jessie van Eerden is such an author (and I that reader). Yoke & Feather, her new book of linked, braided essays, is an entirely convincing paean to the way divine mysteries are made manifest in even the most quotidian details. Making sauerkraut. Trying to connect across the chasm that is the dating app. Staring at seventeenth-century paintings in a museum. Corresponding with a friend.

Van Eerden’s project is to reveal the linkages between what we might consider great concerns—the nature of godliness, the longing to have a child—and small ones, such as the ways home (in her case, West Virginia) imprints its particularities on us. Only through deep observation will revelations appear, in both the heavenly and intellectual senses. She closely watches everything, from her students in middle school and college to her boyfriend asleep, and from them all something else arises. Call it devotion.

The author seeks to do nothing less than rewrite the Gospel in a personal present: “This is revelation,” she offers in the long essay “A Thousand Faces.” About making a charcoal rubbing, “She loves how the leaf is remade on the page torn from her notebook, a full nothing until the charcoal scrubs and discovers.” She repeatedly imagines herself into the lives of biblical figures: Veronica, cured by Jesus of a twelve-year bleed; Martha, sister of Lazarus and witness to the miracle of his return from death; Ruth, whose enduring faith allowed her a child in middle age—all women who suffered and served, redeemed by belief.

In her consideration of their travails, van Eerden finds parallels with her own life, notably as a woman trying to keep the faith that she will one day have a child of her own. If not one she herself bears (the essay titled “A Story of Martha & Mary Taking in a Foster Child” is a tender ode to adoption) then someone else’s—perhaps the children of her boyfriend, newly divorced—and if none of those, her art will suffice to be her offspring. Wondering if she will bear a baby or if she will only ever bring forth literature, she asks, “do I sit on a cold Lenten Sunday to simply write against my own disappearing?”

Elsewhere van Eerden answers the question. Writing is a generative force all its own. “We find good words with which to say the things we do not know how to say,” and this is at once her aspiration and achievement here.

On one level—and the book encompasses a swirling throng of them—Yoke & Feather is intended as a prayer for prayer, for the transformative capacity of words born of hope to be realized in the flesh. It is a book about writing, among many other things. With a series of short essays—“Blessing for the Lice Check,” “Blessing for the Demolition Derby,” “Screen Porch as Prayer”—she asks what prayer is, even as she is writing one into being. In the end, she suggests, a book is a prayer in the form of a mystery: out of nothingness, words; out of words, an evocation of the towering complexity of life itself.

The magnitude of Yoke & Feather’s enterprise is expressed in the book’s intricate double structure that is comprised of essays, each containing several strands of idea and image, which then connect thematically as well as narratively. Part I represents the search for love and connection; Part II the fulfillments of love; Part III, a long essay titled “When Oxen Dream of Oxen,” yields synthesis in the form of an allegory of communion—we are joined in our difference. Or at least I think that’s what it is. Of all the densely enigmatic pieces in a work of uncommon compression, this may be the most difficult to anatomize. The book is a braid of braids.

In winking acknowledgment, there is plenty of self-referential mention of plaits themselves. “I name by braiding: braid back your hair to remember this bend in the river where you made love on the rocks” is but one.

Other such leitmotifs, each carrying a double meaning, marble the book. Paramount are feathers, which appear in nearly every piece. They represent grace, that is, a sign taken for a wonder; the book’s epigraph, from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, forecasts the significance of these feathers everywhere: “Grace is the law of the descending movement.” The yoke (a wooden harness that pairs draft animals, also the joinery of a garment at the point of the womb) symbolizes our earthly bonds: our burdens as well as what connects us.

Yes, it’s all very complicated.

The heightened language in Yoke & Feather—an almost Renaissance diction, sonorous as the King James translation—telegraphs its sacred mission as well as its author’s literary ambitions. “A man lay with me under the sky then left an emptiness”: each sentence contains multitudes, small suitcases so packed with meaning and music it must have been hard to get them closed. Indeed, this line is from a passage meant to paint a portrait of worldly desire while also teasing heavenly union. Or else it’s about viewing James Turrell’s Skyspace. Make that both, which comports with another of the author’s goals: to show how art becomes the site where physical meets mystical.

Consciously poetic, on occasion veering toward overwrought, Yoke & Feather is overtly concerned with Big Questions. But it is when van Eerden comes back down to earth that her book reads most like scripture.