"According to the mystics, the Torah was engraved with black fire on white fire. These poetic midrash too." - Jay Michaelson, author of The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path

In his piercing debut collection, The House at the Center of the World, poet and scholar Abe Mezrich offers a series of beautifully composed short insights on some of the most elusive passages of the Torah: the second half of Exodus, the entirety of Leviticus, and the beginning of Numbers. At once powerful close readings of the text and deeply spiritual literature, these roughly seventy short pieces "carry ethical implications all the way from the ancient era right to the present day" (Dan Friedman, Managing Editor of The Forward). "Direct and accessible," these poems "remind us that our Creator is forgiving, that the spiritual and physical can inform one another, and that the supernatural can be carried into the everyday." (Yehoshua November, author of God's Optimism)