new book: House of Mourning
“Benjamin Shalva’s House of Mourning is a loving book … we, his readers, have been given a gift.”
— Shane McCrae, author of New and Collected Hell
House of Mourning is the debut poetry collection from poet, rabbi, and hospice chaplain Benjamin Shalva. Rooted in Jewish ritual and shaped by years of bedside presence, these poems navigate the liminal space between loss and healing — between the last breath and the first step forward.
Written in the quiet that follows death, in living rooms turned sanctuaries, and in the bewildering stillness of mourning, these poems give voice to what often goes unspoken: the absurdity of grief, the intimacy of caregiving, the holiness of exhaustion, and the stubborn hope that clings to even the most broken hearts.
With tenderness, clarity, and spiritual depth, House of Mourning offers readers not just an elegy, but a rising — a circling around the block on the seventh day, when mourners rise and life, changed but still beating, resumes.
Whether read in solitude, shared in a grief circle, or woven into ritual, these poems meet readers where they are: stunned, searching, healing.
Advance Praise for House of Mourning…
“Benjamin Shalva’s gentle, intelligent voice, from the very beginning of this marvelous collection, invokes an unmitigated light within the darkness of mourning and sadness. In grief, we come to know the clasping and unclasping of the heart: the sitting low to the ground and the closing of doors that precede a coming forth again and the opening of apertures. His poems, controlled, clear, are inspired by his work as a rabbi and by such poets of melancholy as Jane Kenyon, and all the while, in the backdrop, there is what the vicissitudes of history teach us about human pain. I admire this debut deeply, which, like the burning bush in his wonderful poem by that title, reanimate and freshen each time I return to them.”
— David Keplinger, author of Ice
“These ‘tiny psalms of shameless sound’ are miniature masterpieces of disciplined language and original imagery. Don’t let the title prepare you for a book of lamentations; besides reflections on life and death, the book includes snapshots of social life, love, parenthood, and nature, many in the form of short, sometimes haiku-like verse. There’s humor here, too—even a love-poem to a jar of peanut butter.”
— Raymond P. Scheindlin, author of Vulture in a Cage: Poems by Solomon Ibn Gabirol